


Compromised

by companionenvy



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Vaguely Modern Dystopia, Angst with a Happy Ending, But maybe not for a while, F/M, Minor Character Death, Romance, Unredeemed Regina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-06-14 12:06:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 64,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15388404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/companionenvy/pseuds/companionenvy
Summary: When Emma Nolan gives up her comfortable life to join the struggle against the Evil Queen, she goes looking for the fabled hero Robin Hood.The outlaw she finds is a little more complicated.





	1. An Easy Mistake

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: I didn't want to tag for "Major Character Death," as no major characters in this fic will die, but the first chapter does kill off this AU's version of a major canon character. 
> 
> I'm hoping to update about once a week.

_Once upon a time_ , Emma typed, _a princess lived in a castle_.

She winced. It wasn’t remotely her style. But then, she wasn’t doing it for herself.

 _She had a mother and father who loved her and gave her everything her heart could desire. But an evil power had taken hold in the kingdom, and eventually, even the princess in her tower could not close her eyes any longer_.

She closed them now, thinking back to her first meeting with Henry. She had recognized him vaguely as a freshman who had gone to her high school, but they’d never before had occasion to speak. Probably wouldn’t have even if he hadn’t been a few years younger; Henry wasn’t the type to attract the attention of Emma Nolan or her friends. But he had noticed her, and for all that had happened since, and all the consequences that might come, Emma would forever be grateful for it.

"Does it ever bother you?" he had said conversationally, as if he were resuming a chat they had briefly suspended.

"Does what bother me?" she had returned.

"Well, President White was your grandfather," he said. "And Regina killed him, but your parents work for her."

Emma hoped she wasn’t giving away how much the question disturbed her. But the truth is, it _had_ bothered her. Still, she had an answer, the one her parents had given her, and more than once.

" Sometimes you have to put personal feelings aside for the greater good. My family doesn’t like the Queen any more than most people, but being part of the government is the best way to make a difference."

"And what difference have they made?" If there had been even a trace of anger, of irony in his words, Emma would have walked off and never looked back. But the question sounded utterly guileless, though Emma would later learn that the ability to mask his own brand of cunning with the appearance of utter innocence was one of Henry’s peculiar gifts.

Of course, Emma _did_ walk off, that time. _You weren't ready_ , Henry would say later, a little smugly. But he had made her think – or, perhaps more accurately, had given voice to thoughts that she hadn’t given herself permission to think for too many years. When she went back, at first it was to challenge him, only to find that he had more answers ready than questions.

Henry was an orphan, his parents killed in among the first of Regina’s purges of her political enemies. Unlike her parents, who, as the daughter and son-in-law of the deposed president, were powerful allies to cultivate for a usurper looking to shore up legitimacy, Henry’s parents had had no value to Regina, and had not been given the option to compromise. Not that Henry believed they would have, though he was either too polite, or too diplomatic, to say this directly.

Social services, to say the least, hadn’t been a priority of the Mills administration. Henry had grown up in a group home, with too many other children and too few resources. He had seen things that Emma Nolan hadn’t had to see, and had followed his conclusions where they led. And so while PR _was_ a priority of the Mills administration, Henry was able to enlighten Emma on quite a few of the even-less-savory sides of Regina’s policies.

 _And so the princess realized that no matter how many fine dresses she wore, and how much time her handmaidens spent on her golden hair, while she lived as she was she would never be more than an ugly duckling_.

And so was born RebelSwan. The name was Henry’s idea, of course. Emma hadn’t been sure herself why it was so important for her to be the one to write it. Henry was at least as good a writer as she was, and of course, despite Henry’s wildest hopes, the fact that Emma was the daughter of Mary Margaret and David Nolan didn’t actually give her any particularly privileged information. "Its not like Regina comes around to Sunday dinner," she had said. It was Henry himself who had concluded that Emma’s parents weren’t likely to have much in the way of real power, anyway.

"She needs them, but she would never trust them," he said. From what she knew of her parents’ work, Emma thought Henry was right. They were good people – Emma had never stopped believing that for a moment – but, Regina was playing them. She allowed them to "win" often enough that they could keep thinking their compromise had been worth it, but on anything really important, the Queen held her ground. And so a public works project got improved, or a hospital got its funding – and people kept disappearing, and freedoms kept getting narrower. Why they didn’t see it, Emma didn’t know. She had told them herself often enough, this past year.

One of the first freedoms to go, of course, had been a free press, but there were still places online that you could publish, if you knew what you were doing, and Henry did. Emma was skeptical ("You think a _blog_ is going to save the world?" ), but she did it, if only to stave off the desperate helplessness of not being able to do anything else. Even now – especially now – she doubted that it had made much of a difference. It wasn’t as if two college kids were the only dissident writers to get through, or the most knowledgeable, or the most eloquent. But Emma had heard enough whispers in hallways and the streets to know that they were getting attention, even if there was no way they could have traced the words back to old president White’s rich, popular granddaughter, whose cherubic face had been familiar to the whole country before the revolution and hadn’t faded from view since. It had suited Regina’s purposes to keep it there, a smiling symbol of a productive reconciliation between the old regime and the new.

No one knew. Emma wanted it that way, had kept any hint of her identity carefully concealed, over Henry’s protests. She simply wasn’t brave enough; even her parents’ position wouldn’t have been enough to save her if Regina had learned the truth.

Emma had been wrong. Her parents’ position had been enough to save her. It hadn’t been enough to save Henry.

She had no way of proving it. Henry had been a fairly prolific hacker, and the Queen’s investigators could have caught wind of him without any hint of Emma’s involvement, or any particular interest in RebelSwan at all. And perhaps, when they had come to arrest Henry, he really had resisted – she wouldn’t expect anything less of him, honestly – and maybe Regina’s crack forces really had felt so threatened by an unarmed nineteen-year-old that they had had no choice but to shoot.

But Emma didn’t believe it. Somehow, Regina had known, had wanted Henry dead, and not because she was afraid of a blog. It was because she and Henry, in the end, had something in common: both were waiting for the moment when Emma Nolan might become a more dangerous enemy to the regime than an anonymous blogger could ever be. She was sending a message. And Emma had received it.

 _I'm ready, Henry_.

If Henry were here, Emma thought as she typed his name, he wouldn’t approve of the shift in genre. _Emma, you're breaking the fourth wall!_ she could almost hear him say. Except she wouldn’t hear him say anything ever again, because Henry had been killed, because of her. And no one deserved to find himself in a storybook – story _blog_ – more than Henry, who had believed in the power of stories more truly than anyone Emma had ever met, believed in them with the same desperate faith that he believed, past all reason, in Emma herself.

What she had just written, what she was about to write, she owed to him.

 _This is Emma Nolan, learning to fly_.

She hit "post." The blog would be taken down, of course, but not soon enough for Regina, and not soon enough for Emma to ever go back to the life she had lived.

Not that she intended to. Emma may have just sent her old life crashing down in flames, but she had a plan. Because Emma had listened to Henry’s stories, and if she was going to do this without him – or even begin to know where to start – there was only one man who could help her.

Emma was going to find Robin Hood.

***********

Of course, the reason Robin Hood was still alive and well and thumbing his nose at the Queen every chance he got was because he wasn’t an easy man to find. The underground sources she and Henry had pored over hadn’t gotten a lot more specific than "second star to the right, and straight on till morning." But Emma wasn’t a pampered princess – or, at least, she was prepared to learn how not to be. Everyone knew that even Regina had more or less given up on subduing the loose association of outlaws and vagrants who had coalesced around Sherwood Forest. If Robin Hood was anywhere, it would be there. Emma could survive for however long it would take to find someone who would lead her to him – and fend off anyone with less helpful designs on her. She wondered, sometimes, if her parents hadn’t had their reasons for encouraging her to take up fencing.

Or, perhaps, she wouldn’t have to. She had only been wandering in the forest for a matter of hours when a lilting, male voice called out to her. " A little lost, love?"

Emma turned around, pulling out her sabre – its point conveniently sharpened well beyond university league regulations. The man laughed, still mostly concealed by the surrounding trees.

"Well, I was just going to welcome you to my woods, but if you’re in the mood for a fight..."

_His_ woods? Then was this...

" Robin Hood?" said Emma.

"Afraid not, darling, but it's an easy mistake to make."

He stepped out of the shadows. The man was tall, and young, and handsome, with dark hair and blue eyes that might have held her gaze for longer if her own hadn’t been drawn quickly to another feature.

Glinting in the rising sunlight, where the man’s left hand should have been, was a silver hook.


	2. Standing up

Emma took a step back, and then recovered, holding her blade steady before her. “Don’t come any closer,” she said. “Or I’ll take your other hand.”

“You could try,” he said, still sounding amused. “But you wouldn’t get very far.” In an instant, he had produced a gun from a holster Emma hadn’t noticed against his black leather outfit.

What would Henry have done? What _had_ he done? The noble thing, no doubt. But Emma was no use to anyone dead. She dropped the sabre, putting her hands up.

“You know who I am, then?” he said. To her relief, he had lowered the gun.

Of course she did. The Queen may have feared Robin Hood, but _everyone_ feared Captain Hook, whose ruthlessness was the stuff of legend. Utterly fearless himself, the one thing that could be said for him was that his most frequent target was Regina herself. There were all kinds of stories about the origin of their feud. Some said the Queen had killed his lover. Some said the Queen had _been_ his lover. Less romantic sorts pointed out that, vendetta or not, for any bandit worth his salt, the Queen and her allies were simply the only targets left with anything to steal. But whatever his reasons, Hook didn’t much seem to care who else got caught up in the crossfire. The Nolans had been lucky to escape his notice – although, Emma had to admit, they wouldn’t have been the least legitimate marks he could have hit. There had been nights in Emma’s childhood where the doors had been locked tighter and the guards increased after word had gotten out that some other member of their circle had come home to an empty safe, if they were lucky, and an empty safe and a dead guard or two, if they weren’t.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Hook had proven his physical courage more than once, but he didn’t risk open combat when an alternative presented itself. Once he had bombed a medical convoy that Regina had been using to smuggle a valuable weapon. The weapon had wound up in the hands of an enemy state, Hook had wound up with a cool million, if reports could be believed, and twelve doctors had wound up dead. Another time, he had sunk a passenger ship transporting a portion of the royal coffers after one of Regina’s raids. The Captain had escaped the wreck. The other forty people on board – including eight children – had not.

“I know who you are,” said Emma, hoping her tone would convey contempt rather than fear.

“I thought you might,” he said. “But more to the point, I know who you are, Miss Nolan. Or would you prefer Miss Swan?”

For a moment, surprise overcame her terror. “How do you know?”

“Come,” he said. “If you’re in a conversational mood, let’s do it as we walk. I try not to travel by day more than I can help.”

Emma didn’t move.

He gave an exaggerated sigh, “Look, Swan, we both know who holds the cards here. You can come with me quietly, or I can tie you up and carry you.”

She glared at him, but walked forward, signaling her assent. Emma hated to admit it, but he was right. She didn’t have a choice.

“Excellent,” he said with a little flourish that he might have intended for a mock bow. “Believe it or not, but I really have no desire to hurt you.”

“I’m going to go with not,” said Emma.

“Suit yourself,” he said, motioning her off the path, through a gap in the trees. “As for how I know who you are, a man in my position survives by knowing things. When one of my sources told me that the author of a particularly self-righteous, histrionic blog I’d had the misfortune to notice had revealed herself as the famous Emma Nolan, I saw an opportunity, and took it.”

“How did you find me?”

“Your survival skills are likely nil, and you write a self-righteous, histrionic blog. Of course you were going to go looking for Robin Hood.”

But Emma couldn’t even decide whether or not to take the bait. As he had spoken, she’d realized what she should have the instant he admitted to knowing who she was. “You’re going to ransom me.”

“Obviously.”

_Don’t beg,_ she told herself. _Don’t beg._ But even if she wouldn’t beg, she had to try appealing to whatever long-buried sympathies the man might have. If the stories were true, he had loved someone, once.

“Regina will kill me,” she said flatly.

He stopped walking and turned to face her. An expression that Emma couldn’t identify passed across his face. If she didn’t know any better, she’d almost say he looked _hurt._

But the moment had passed. “I’m not ransoming you to Regina, you little idiot,” he said. “You think I want _her_ breathing down my neck? I’m ransoming you to your parents.”

That was…considerably less awful, if not without its own associated problems. “And you think I can just go back? No hard feelings from the Queen?”

“I think your parents will do whatever it is rich mommies and daddies do when their darlings get into trouble,” he said. “Pack you off across the border, I shouldn’t wonder. Maybe even go along for the ride. Either way, I’ll be rich, and you’ll be their problem.”

The terrible thing was, it was tempting. Her parents _would_ follow her over the border. They could start over. Be safe.

And leave everyone else behind, under Regina’s rule. Whatever Emma had come to think about her parents’ choices, she knew they at least hadn’t been selfish ones. The Nolans could have gotten out fifteen years ago, as many of their rich friends had done. For better or worse, they had stayed because they thought it was right. So, in her very different way, would Emma. If only Hook gave her the chance.

“Unfortunately for both of us,” he continued, “this happy ending is going to have to wait a while. Right now, I’m sure Regina has her spies all over your parents’ place, waiting for you to come crawling back home. Not to mention out in these woods, looking for you here. So we’ll have to lie low for a while.”

Then she had time. She could work with that. But she wasn’t planning on spending more time at Hook’s mercy than she could help. He was already sensitive to the dangers of keeping her; time to raise the stakes.

“Good plan,” she said. “Only there’s something I haven’t told you.” She paused for effect, but he didn’t react. “You may think I’m stupid, but I didn’t leave home without a plan of my own. I contacted Robin Hood last week. I was supposed to be at the rendezvous point hours ago. He’s already out there, looking for me. And I bet he knows these woods – and whatever lairs you’ve got hidden away out here – a lot better than Regina does.”

It would, Emma realized, have been a good idea. Too bad she’d been too impulsive to actually take the time to do it.

Hook stopped, a few paces ahead, and turned to face her. “That’s an interesting little fairy tale you’ve spun,” he said. “Entertaining, plausible – possibly, I’ve underrated your survival instincts. Unfortunately, I happen to know that Robin Hood hasn’t been in Sherwood for weeks. That’s the problem with these hero types, you know. Always off on some quest or another. I suppose he’ll get around to bringing me to justice one of these days. But it won’t be in time for you.” He resumed walking, calling behind him, “Now, if you’re done playing games, I’ll lead you to my _lair_.”

Emma could do nothing but follow.

********

_Lair,_ she thought, when they finally arrived, had been putting it generously. The word had a certain romance to it, and Hook’s…whatever it was had none. If Emma were being polite, she could call it a cabin. If she weren’t, she might call it a shack. Its furniture consisted of a bare mattress on the floor and a small table and chair that looked like they had probably been swiped off the side of a road before they could be taken out with the trash.

There was something vaguely unsettling about it, though at first Emma couldn’t have said what. But gradually, she realized, that what was bothering her wasn't all that was missing. It was the obvious signs that this place, run-down and sparse as it was, was someone’s home. There was a cooking range in one corner, a few pots and pans piled atop the burners. A black shirt was draped across the chair, as if to dry. There were even a few paperbacks scattered on the mattress, which for some reason bothered Emma most of all. She wouldn’t have pegged Hook for a reader. _When a villain reads,_ she wondered, _Who does he root for?_

She was being stupid, of course. What had she expected? Hook had to eat, and it only took one look at the man to see that he was keeping himself clean and well groomed. She’d probably find nail polish and guyliner in the bathroom. And even the scourge of the realm had to get bored; why shouldn’t he read?

It was just…sort of pathetic, she supposed. He was evil, through and through; every word he’d said to her had confirmed it, but the man who had smirked and swaggered his way through the forest for the past several hours, who had plundered and pillaged his way through Regina’s domain for years before that, was larger than life. Let alone a life like the one he seemed to be living.

“Are you hungry?” asked Hook. He looked, suddenly, vaguely embarrassed, as if he could tell what Emma had been thinking.

“I’ve still got some food in my pack, thanks,” she said, immediately regretting the last word. It had come out automatically, a long-ingrained response to the slightest forms of courtesy. This man had kidnapped her. There was nothing to thank him for. If her brief moment of sympathy earlier had made her forget who she was dealing with, his next words reminded her.

“Right. Your pack. I’d been meaning to ask you about that. Come on, let’s see the haul.” When she didn’t move, he advanced, deftly cutting through the strap with his hook. An inch deeper and it could have been her flesh.

There wasn’t much to interest him. Emma had, by necessity, packed light, taking little more than a few changes of clothes and some toiletries. But she had had foresight enough to pack some jewelry that she could pawn if she needed to.

“Why Swan, you were holding out on me,” Hook crowed as he examined it. “Bad form, you know. Share and share alike.” It was expensive stuff; Hook had good reason to be pleased. But something wasn’t adding up.

“Why do you care? You’re going to get way more than that from my parents soon enough.”

“Thief’s habit,” he said. “A jewel in my hand is worth two in your pocket, and all that. Besides, it might be weeks before I collect on you.”

But something still didn’t add up, hadn’t since the moment she’d walked through this door.

“I still don’t get it. You’ve been stealing for years. I don’t know if you _really_ made a million on that weapons deal, but you must have gotten something for it. The amount you’ve stolen from my parents’ friends alone should have made you rich. And yet, you’re living here and salivating over a couple of diamonds.”

“Ah, so you’ve discovered the bandit’s curse,” he answered smoothly. “I can _get_ all the money I want, but what can I do with it? Can’t invest it, obviously. Building a house? I haven’t stayed in one place longer than a few months in nearly fifteen years. I can’t keep it on me; impressive as I am, it would be more than my life’s worth to get a reputation for carrying my loot around. So I do what I expect your parents do with the money they aren’t saving for a rainy day or putting into the estate or wasting on your education. I spend it.”

“On what?” she said, gesturing around the nearly bare room.

“On whatever I like,” he said. “Which, mostly, means wine, gambling and whores. Though I’ve occasionally indulged in more respectable vices.”

“You didn’t spend a million dollars in a brothel.”

“When you have a million dollars, lass, you don’t need a brothel to find plenty of whores.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Guilty as charged.” He continued rifling through her bag, though Emma knew he wouldn’t find anything else of value.

Apparently, Hook had come to the same conclusion. His eyes went to the chain around Emma’s neck.

“Give me that one.”

“No.”

“Are we really going through this again?” he said. “I thought we’d established the balance of power. Hand it over, or this hook gets closer to your neck than I suspect you’d like.”

“It’s worthless,” Emma said, trying to keep her voice neutral. “I swear.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

Before he could touch her, Emma pulled the swan pendant out from under her shirt.

“See?” she said. It was made of cheap metal, the kind of thing you won for cashing in your tickets at the fair. “Worthless.”

“Not to you, apparently,” said Hook, running the charm through his hand. “Maybe I’ve found _your_ price.”

Before she could think about it, Emma had slapped him in the face, hard. She knew better than to think it had really hurt him, but he seemed too surprised to respond immediately. Which was good, because it was time to face the fear that she had felt, without quite admitting it to herself, ever since she had seen the single mattress on the floor.

“Hook, so help me, if you touch this – if you touch me – I will scream till I’ve brought every member of the Queen’s Guard to this shack. I’ll do it until my voice is hoarse, every day, until someone hears me. And I will run every time you leave my sight, and yes” – he had started to speak, but she wouldn’t let him interrupt – “You’ll catch me, I know. I wouldn’t get far alone. But you just told me that you have to move every few months, which means there are people out there who you’re afraid of, which means you can’t draw that much attention. Tie me up, if you want, but given that you’d be doing it one-handed, with whatever materials you have in this room, I don’t much like your chances.”

“That’s a worse bluff than before. You do that, you’re dead, too. You may not have realized it, _princess,_ but I probably saved your life this morning. If I hadn’t found you, Regina’s men would have.”

“Hook, last night, I left my parents, who I love more than anything, and took off for the woods because I was done compromising. I don’t suppose you’d understand, but not everything can be bought. Even if someone offers my life as the price.”

He didn’t answer right away. She expected another joke, or maybe even an attack. It wasn’t a bluff, but he didn’t know that, and Emma wasn’t at all sure that anyone would come before her voice gave out. When he spoke again, his own voice sounded different, huskier and more subdued than she had yet heard it.

“You can keep your necklace, Swan. And Emma,” – he raised his eyes to hers when he said her name for the first time – “I was never going to hurt you. I swear it, for whatever that’s worth.”

“Why should I believe a word you say?”

He took an audible breath. “Just because a man’s spent years on the floor doesn’t mean he’s forgotten how to walk.” He went toward the door, and sat, his back to it. “I’m tired, and I expect you are too. Take the mattress; I’ve slept in worse places than this.”

Emma lay down, but sleep was a long time in coming. What preoccupied her thoughts, however, wasn’t the danger she was in. It was that she had recognized the words Hook had just used, as he must have known she would.

_For some of us,_ Emma had written, all those months ago, _the suffering is obvious. Maybe Regina has killed someone you loved, or thrown them in jail, or taken your lands, or your livelihood. But the thing about living under a tyrant is that most of us, most days, will be perfectly safe, even happy. We go to school, and work. We eat, and laugh, and fall in love. And those are the ones who are truly in danger of something far worse even than the Queen’s punishments. Their souls die by degrees, bit by bit, until maybe they can’t even remember the preciousness of what they’ve bartered for another day of quiet, and safety, and the illusion of peace._

_I was like that all my life. Was raised in that beautiful illusion. But then I woke up, and so can you._

_Just because you’ve spent years on the floor doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten how to walk. And you can start – we can all start – by standing up._

Self-righteous and histrionic, Hook had called her writing. But his tone a moment ago hadn't been mocking, and he’d gotten the line right, word for word.

Who was this man?


	3. The New Normal

Emma woke up to a cheerful “Morning, Swan” from Hook, who, by the smell of things, was making French toast. It would have been almost domestic, if he hadn’t been amusing himself by spearing the slices on his hook every time he flipped the bread. Slices, she noted. Plural.

Captain Hook was making Emma French toast. “It’s the middle of the night,” she observed, if only to reassert some sense of reality to the surreal scene.

“Morning is relative,” he answered. “This is when I wake up. Hence, morning. You’ll get used to it.”

Hook had mentioned that he didn’t travel during the day, but Emma hadn’t taken that to mean he was literally nocturnal. Although that could actually be convenient, she realized.

“No, I won’t. You’ll sleep during the day, like a vampire. I’ll sleep during the night, like a normal human being. We won’t have to see each other. Win-win.”

“Fine with me. Although don’t think that will increase your chances of escape. I’m a light sleeper, and I have no intention of going anywhere until you’re safely out of my hair. Which, judging by my morning paper, may be sooner than we thought.”

He turned off the burner, and brought the whole pan over to the mattress, seating himself cross-legged a few feet from her. Apparently, plates weren’t among the place’s amenities. They would have to share.

Emma looked down at her slice of toast, which by now resembled a soggy pincushion (oddly, maple syrup evidently _was_ among the place’s amenities). A soggy pincushion, she thought darkly, or the bullet-riddled bodies of Hook’s victims. His cryptic comment from last night (last afternoon?) may have left her intrigued, but it hadn’t made her forget that she was sharing breakfast with a murderer. In the middle of the night.

“Utensils?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he stuck his hook through one of the holes in his own slice, dangling the bread over his mouth before taking a bite.

“Right, stupid question,” she sighed.

“I can cut it up for you if you like,” he said with a grin.

“I’ll manage,” she said, folding the slice over and holding it like a piece of pizza. It was surprisingly good. Hook had even added cinnamon.

When she had finished, she said, “What did you say about the paper?”

“You’re in it,” he said, passing it over to her.

Emma took it. Her picture was on the front page (of the _evening,_ not morning edition, she noticed) of the _Mirror,_ under the headline “Runaway Heiress.” She suspected that Regina had nixed a more colorful lede -- “Flight of the Swan”? -- at the last minute. In fact, the article, Emma was not terribly surprised to see, said nothing at all about RebelSwan, painting Emma as a troubled rich girl who had fallen into bad company. Henry’s story – or, rather, Regina’s version of it – was duly invoked; reading between the lines, the Queen was trying to set the stage for an eventual treason charge without drawing anyone’s attention to Emma’s writing. For now, however, the official line seemed to be a slightly belated teenage rebellion.

Of course, it was pointless. Even Regina’s partisans knew better than to rely on the _Mirror_ for real news. Anyone who cared to, and many who didn’t, would have known exactly why Emma had left home within hours of her final post.

There was only one reason Emma herself had been interested in the paper at all.

_Mary Margaret and David Nolan, long-time members of the Queen’s council, and staples of the local charitable and social scenes, declined requests for interview, asking for the public’s privacy during this painful time._

_“We just want our daughter to be safe,” said Mrs. Nolan, before closing the door on reporters. Mr. Nolan added that Miss Nolan had taken her passport, leading them to fear that she intended to leave the country._

“You see?” said Hook, when she had put it down. “I don’t expect the Queen to give up right away, but if you don’t surface in a few days, she’ll assume you’ve skipped town and scale back the search. Clever of you, to take your passport to throw her off the scent.”

Emma smiled. “I didn’t,” she said. Plenty of people would recognize her without it, but she had decided that carrying identification was an unnecessary risk. “My parents made that up.  They’re buying me time.” And sending her a warning, she had realized. _We just want our daughter to be safe._ Not “we want our daughter home.” She just hoped Regina wouldn’t pick up on it.

“Clever of them, then. I almost feel bad about how much money I’m about to take from them. _Almost_.”

When Emma didn’t dignify that with a response, he cleared his throat and continued. “I’m sorry about your friend. He deserved better.”

“Thank you,” said Emma, and this time, it wasn’t just a reflex. Henry _had_ deserved better, and whatever else Hook might be, she couldn’t help but be grateful to anyone who acknowledged it. Too few ever had, in his life or after his death.

“The swan necklace – he gave it to you?” Hook asked.

But this was getting into dangerous ground. She wasn’t going to accept comfort from _Captain Hook,_ of all people.

“Where did you get a paper?” she asked.

“I’ve told you, I have my--”

“Your sources, yeah, I know.” She paused. “Does that mean someone knows I’m here?”

“Don’t worry, I killed him.”

“You--”

_“Joking,_ Swan,” he added quickly. “I’m not a complete sociopath, you know.”

“Hysterical,” said Emma, and deliberately turned from him, opening the pages of one of the books by the bedside. He might not have been a complete sociopath, but he was close enough that Emma wasn’t inclined to encourage further conversation.

*********

Despite her resolution, over the next few days, Emma and Hook settled into a disconcertingly normal routine. Their different sleep patterns indeed meant that they didn’t have to interact for most of the day, but as they were spending the entire time confined to a single room, that still left them with plenty of hours to fill. They both passed a good portion of the time reading; as their library boasted only three books, Hook had already read them all at least once, and Emma couldn’t help but be drawn into an occasional conversation, in which Hook’s responses to what he had read failed to reveal any particular signs of entrenched moral depravity. He cooked most meals, if the increasingly meager fare could be called meals, but Emma had taken her turn as well, if only to prove that growing up in a mansion staffed by servants did not, in fact, mean that she was entirely useless in all practical matters. Aside from Hook’s passing references to ransoming her, they never referred to the past or future, as if these few days were a pocket out of time, sealed off from the rest of experience.

It was like what Emma had said about Regina. The dangerous thing about villains was how very _normal_ they could seem, and how normal the worlds they ruled, whether that world happened to be a kingdom or a shack in the woods. Emma was sleeping on a bare mattress in a hovel while a serial killer schemed how best to sell her, and yet the serial killer passed her a napkin, or griped about her snoring, or asked if she’d gotten to the good part of his favorite novel, and it suddenly assumed the semblance of a functional life.

But Emma wasn’t going to stop looking for a way out. She _had_ thought about the things that she and Hook weren’t discussing, and especially, what her options were if she did manage to escape him. It was a fairly depressing prospect, and again, a part of her was tempted to let Hook’s plan take its course. Even if she made it out, she would have no money, and nothing to trade; Hook, not taking any chances, had taken to wearing the jewelry he had stolen from Emma around his own neck. If Hook was telling the truth about Robin Hood, there was no way of knowing when he’d be back. She might find other allies, in the forest – maybe even some of Robin’s people– but she was just as likely to find one of Hook’s “sources” first. And, she had to admit, speaking strictly in terms of her own personal safety, Emma could do a lot worse than Hook. True to his word, he hadn’t touched her; even the leering and innuendo had stopped after Emma’s outburst that first day. Selfish as he was, the form that selfishness had currently taken was one likely to end in Emma safe with her parents beyond Regina’s domains.

Or was it? Even if Hook was being honest about his intentions, his plan had inherent risks, even leaving aside that it involved her mother and father being extorted out of what would no doubt be an outrageous sum of money, and Emma herself abandoning all real hopes of doing anything in the fight against Regina. Despite her parents’ misdirection, Regina might still be watching them, her spies ready to intercept any message and waylay any intruder. Someone at the house – maybe even her father – might try to fight Hook, and wind up dead for their nerve.

But Emma had also realized that it would be naïve to assume that Hook _was_ being honest about his intentions. Past a certain point, the amount of money he took in on a given strike couldn’t possibly matter to someone with no means of keeping it. If he’d wanted to, he’d had wealth enough in the past to disappear overseas for the rest of his life. But he had stayed here, and if all he could actually spend his money on was meaningless debauchery, the only way he could unload really large sums of cash as quickly as his safety required was to waste most of it entirely. The amount he would get from selling even one of Emma’s necklaces would be more than enough to satisfy his most extravagant desires for the near future, and the near future was all a man in his position was capable of living in. Whether he pawned one necklace, or took all of the Nolans’ wealth, the money had to be gone in fairly short order, leaving him to go on to his next target.

So it wasn’t about the money. And if it wasn’t about the money, it was hard for Emma to see how ransoming her to her parents was the best choice, here. Hook was a gambler, and a showman, and he hated Regina. That last might be enough for him to want to deny Regina her prize, but on balance, Emma didn’t think so. Regina had a lot of enemies; Emma wasn’t vain enough to think that killing Emma was the peak of her desires, and Hook knew it. He could get a lot more satisfaction from extorting money from the Queen than he would from extorting money from Mary Margaret and David Nolan. More satisfaction, and more notoriety. From his previous exploits, Emma knew that Hook was nothing if not flashy. Sending a ransom note to two desperate parents wasn’t flashy. Forcing the Queen to make terms with someone who actually _was_ one of her worst enemies was much more the Captain’s style. It was even possible that he didn’t actually intend to ransom Emma at all, just to use her as bait to get Regina to come to him.

So, escape it was, if she could manage it. There were no windows in the cabin, and Hook slept with his body barring the door. He wore his gun to sleep and kept her sabre at his side. She might manage swiping the latter, but even if Emma had been inclined to repeat her earlier embarrassment with the blade, she knew she didn’t have it in her to run a man through while he slept, and suspected Hook would recognize any attempt at a threat for the bluff it was.

Still, the risk of complacency cut both ways. If a few days with no attempted assaults and some light banter might lull her into a false sense of security, so might her apparent resignation and the diminution of open hostility lead Captain Hook to let his guard down, especially against an opponent he hadn’t respected much in the first place. She just hoped her opportunity would come in time.

And suddenly, it did. On the fourth night, Emma awoke to a clear, sharp whistle penetrating the thin walls of the cabin. Hook, who had been sitting at the table, swore and jumped up when he heard it, luckily missing Emma’s own response in time for her to close her eyes and feign sleep. She didn’t open them until she heard the door shut behind him.

When Emma had imagined this moment, over the past few days, the scene ended with her running and not looking back. But the whistle had changed matters. Someone was signaling Hook, and she wanted to know who it was. He hadn’t been happy to hear it; an enemy of his might be a friend of hers. Even if he wasn’t, as Hook had told her, information could mean survival. Running meant uncertainty, and a high probability of capture, either by Hook himself, as soon as he discovered she was gone, or by someone else who would turn her over to Regina without a second thought. It had always been a gamble. So was this, but maybe a better one. Depending on what she heard, she could still decide to run off, with only slightly worse odds than she would have if she left now. But she also might hear something she could use to her advantage. Hook had shown her that he could be cowed by someone willing to make some noise.

In the end, she’d be letting fate decide, anyway. Emma hadn’t given herself long to think, but Hook had a head start, and she didn’t know which way he had gone. If she didn’t find him, she would keep going. If she did, she would wait.

*****

Every life, Emma supposed, had a few moments that determined, far more than any others, the path that life would take. A woman went to one party and not the other, and so met the man that would become her husband. Or she woke up late for work and collided with a car that had still been idling in its owner’s garage half an hour earlier. Most of the time, we didn’t even recognize these moments, the potentially innumerable points where our lives _could_ have changed, and didn’t. But in the years to come, Emma would always be able to point to this one, the sound of boots snapping a fallen branch in the woods, arresting her steps and leading her back towards its source, as the turning point of her life.

She moved quickly but carefully, grateful for the night and the heavy cover of the trees. She was barefoot, and had thrown Hook’s leather jacket, which he had left behind, over her brighter clothing. When she heard Hook’s voice, she took cover behind a group of bushes outside what she assumed would be his likeliest line of sight.

“…I could have handled it,” he was saying. “I told you to stay away.”

To Emma’s shock, it was a child’s high voice that answered back. “I didn’t come just for that. Wendy’s sick. She needs medicine.”

“Do you need me to -”

“No, just the money.”

When Hook didn’t answer right away, Emma ventured a look. The boy looked to be about eleven or twelve years old. Hook lifted Emma’s diamond necklace from around his neck.

“I’m a little cash poor at the moment. Take this to Gold; if you tell him I sent you, he’ll give you a fair price. It should be enough. I’m going to have to leave this place soon, so you won’t find me again. I’ll come ‘round when I can. In the meantime...”

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “I _know_.”

“Be safe, John,” said Hook.

“Thank you, Captain,” said the boy, and darted off. A moment later, Hook headed back in the opposite direction, Emma following at a discreet distance.

She didn’t call out to him right away. It took a moment for her to process it. Hook had been meeting with a child in the forest. He had given him money, and, by the sound of it, it hadn’t been the first time. Was he Hook’s son? Hook was probably about ten years older than Emma, certainly old enough to be the boy’s father. But the child had called him “Captain.” And if Hook had a hidden family that he was bothering to support, they wouldn’t have any reason to want for money by now.

 And then, suddenly, the pieces fell into place. Hook was an enemy of Regina, a bold thief who called Sherwood Forest “his” woods. He stole from the rich and, apparently, gave to the poor. He might be the feared Captain Hook. But that wasn't all he was.

“Hook!” she called. He spun around. “Or, should I say, Robin Hood?"


	4. Confession

_Deal with the crisis first. Before you do anything else, you have to get her out of the open_. The thought was stabilizing, allowing Killian to push aside all the other implications of what had just happened.

“We need to get back. Quickly. I don’t know how much of that you heard, but Regina’s scouts are in the area. We’ll talk at the cabin.” To his relief, she followed without a protest.

At least the girl appeared to be taking it seriously. There was no triumph on her face, no delight as she called him Robin Hood. She seemed to sense that whatever this meant for her, and whatever it meant about him, she hadn’t stumbled into one of the storybooks she invoked so generously on her blog.

Good, he thought. She was learning. And maybe wouldn’t be as disappointed as he feared.

If he were honest, it was what he had been fearing all along, since the moment he’d realized that saving her from her colossal stupidity wasn’t going to be as easy as sending her on her way.                                                                                                    

Many people hated Captain Hook. A few people admired him. Others still, within the forest, viewed him as a force of inscrutable chaos, a devil worth dealing with when his own dark purposes aligned with your own. Either way, it didn’t matter, because Captain Hook wasn’t real. Not to the people who believed every lie Regina had ever had printed about him. Not to the far smaller group who disbelieved every _truth_ that had ever been printed about him, taking Hook for the kind of folk hero he himself had invented when he invented Robin Hood.

And that was the way Killian wanted it. Not since Ava and Nicholas had he allowed anyone close enough to really enter his life, and that was long enough ago that little Ava had to be at least Emma’s age by now. Even for the Darlings, he was the Captain, the man of mystery who came when you whistled before vanishing back into the night.

But with Emma, simple circumstance had forced his hand. Until now, it had seemed possible that he might just escape this without having to let her see any more of Hook than he wanted her to see. But simply having her there, in his home, sleeping on his mattress, reading his books had been something too akin to intimacy for his comfort. It was that, more than anything else, that had forced him to let the mask drop as far as it had, even before now.

 And now…

He could still contain the damage. Add some more lies to the tally. But even as he thought it, he knew he wouldn’t. Once he had decided on saving Emma, circumstance may have forced his hand, but saving Emma in the first place had been a choice. One that had perhaps been sealed, though Killian hadn’t known it at the time, when he kept on reading the first time he had caught wind of the pretentious dissident blogger calling herself RebelSwan. She was pretentious, and naïve, and painfully earnest, and he couldn’t tell, even now, if what he had wanted most was to save her, or for her to save him. _Self-righteous,_ he had called it, but only because it had been many years since he had been able to say “righteous” without irony.

Emma was good. No fairy-tale princess – she had too much spirit for that – but still good in a straightforward and uncomplicated way that put even the best parts of Captain Hook and Killian Jones to shame. For better or worse, she now knew that he wasn’t quite as bad as he seemed. And Killian had conscience enough that he couldn’t leave her thinking he was better than he was, either.

It was time, at long last, to confess.

*****

“The first thing you need to understand,” said Killian when they were back in the relative safety of the cabin, “is that it wasn’t all lies. Not what I said; not what you’ve heard. I don’t give everything I steal to helpless orphans now, and I certainly didn’t at first. I spent most of the first few years filthy drunk; I’d say it was a miracle I didn’t get myself killed, if I had done anything at all to deserve one.”

And, he didn’t add, if he didn’t sometimes wonder, even now, if a quick death would have been the most merciful thing whatever power there was could have done for him.

“Have you actually killed anyone?” asked Emma.

“Yes,” said Killian, without hesitating. “Though Regina has laid plenty of her own bodies at my door. I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that the worst crimes she pinned on me were cover-ups. The ship, for instance. I can only imagine there was someone on it she wanted dead. The few men I’ve killed – I won’t pretend it was justified; I had no right to be in their homes in the first place – but it was only when it came down to a choice of their lives or mine.”

He took a moment before continuing; what he had to tell her next was the part she was least likely to forgive.

“But that’s only the people I killed _after_ I became a thief.”

Emma gave a start at this, as well she might, but didn’t interrupt.

“Before I started stealing from Regina, I served in her army. I took part in the coup against your grandfather, celebrated when he died. The best I can say in my defense is that I was fool enough to think I was acting for justice. You’re too young to really remember the years when Regina was gaining power, but for a time, there were more people who actually believed in her than just the cowed toadies she has left now. It was – from everything I’ve heard since, I believe your grandfather was a decent man, and I understand now that he wasn’t responsible for all the ills of the world. But I was an angry teenager, who knew little more than that the world wasn’t everything it should be, and that Regina was promising to change it. Rob from the rich, and give to the poor, if you will. To me, nothing sounded fairer.

“My mother had died when I was eight. My father was rarely sober for long enough to hold down a job. We spent half our lives dodging his creditors, and sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time, leaving me and my older brother to fend for ourselves. Liam -- ” – Killian realized as he said it that it was the first time he’d spoken the name aloud since the day Liam had died – “was the one who really raised me. He was five years older, and the only reason that we didn’t wind up in foster care is that he did a good enough job taking care of us to hide the truth from everyone else. He sacrificed everything for me. He was smart, probably could have gone to college on scholarship if he’d tried for one. But he wouldn’t leave me, though I now wish to God that he had.

“I was sixteen when I left home to join Regina. Liam had never been as taken in by her as I had, tried to tell me that she couldn’t be trusted. But he had protected me my whole life, and for so much of his own that I don’t think he knew how to do anything else. He joined Regina to watch over me, and much as I regret it now, in some ways, those months, fighting with him side by side, were the happiest of my life.

“I don’t know when he started working against her, although I do believe that, in this one case at least, Regina hadn’t trumped up the charges. For all I know, he may have even tried to prevent the coup. But it was obviously clear to him, much earlier than to most, the direction things were going once she won. Idiot that I was, I argued with him. Defended her, convinced myself that anything she did was a small price to pay for a much greater good, that the reforms she had promised were coming, that we just needed to be patient. In the meantime, though of course I didn’t know it then, he’d begun informing on her activities to a group of partisans who’d established a government-in-exile just across the northern border.

“One day not a year after she’d taken over, Regina called for him to step forth during an assembly of her forces. I thought he was being rewarded for something, but of course he knew better. He squeezed my shoulder as he walked forward; the only good-bye he could give me. No one watching him approach the throne would have seen anything to tell them that he was a man knowingly walking to his own execution.

“When she started speaking, and I understood what he was being accused of, I ran forward, started shouting I don’t know what about it being a mistake. The guards held me back, and I watched as the only person I had really ever loved was shot down before my eyes. If it had been a little bit later in her reign, I expect I would have been next, but Regina wasn’t even then as unhinged as she would become. There was no evidence I had done anything wrong, and I was, though it’s a wonder to think of now, well-liked and respected among her men. She relieved me of my position, and ordered her guards to send me on my way.

“But if she wasn’t yet willing to execute a popular solder with no evidence in front of the whole army, she was paranoid enough not to want to leave a potential enemy alive. While I was at the apartment I had shared with Liam, drinking myself into a stupor, she sent two of her assassins to kill me. Fortunately, she had chosen poorly; one of them, a man named Graham, couldn’t go through with it and gave me time to get away before his fellow arrived. Time to get away, but not entirely clean.”

“Your hand,” Emma guessed.

“Aye, my hand. It was a slight wound, really, but a bit of the bullet was lodged in my skin, and it became infected. Even then, I’m sure a competent doctor could have found a way to treat it, but I couldn’t exactly walk into a hospital while on Regina’s hit list. The back-alley butcher I finally went to said it had to come off entirely, and so I became Captain Hook.

“At first, I suppose I had some idea of getting my revenge by actually killing her. A few times, I even got close, although you wouldn’t have read about that in the paper. But mostly, I had to content myself with the pettier triumphs of embarrassing her by brazen thefts and flouting any attempts to bring me to what she called justice.

“And then, about three years in, I came across two children, Ava and Nicholas. Or, more accurately, they came across me. I had gotten a reputation, by then, and it was already mostly a bad one, but Ava had convinced herself that I was some kind of hero and so, much like you, she came to the forest looking for a champion. She was eleven years old; Nicholas was nine. Their mother was dead, and their father had been thrown in prison for debt. A debt she thought a noble thief might be willing to pay.

“I looked at her, and I saw Liam all over again, Liam, trying to protect his younger brother at any cost.  I suppose I was also lonely, and flattered by the way she saw me, even if I knew it was a child’s fantasy. Either way, I decided to drag myself out of the bottom of the bottle for long enough to help.

“The debt was large, larger than even my average haul could pay. Frankly, most of my early thefts from the crown were small enough, in relative terms, to be more symbolic than anything else; Regina was incensed that I was able to get away with it, more than that I was really getting away with anything of major value. This would take real money, and real planning.

“It soon became obvious to me that my best chance wouldn’t come by stealing from Regina directly. I choose one of her allies, a socialite named Corrine Deville. It took three months for me to come up with a plan I was satisfied with, and in the meantime, Ava and Nicholas were living with me. I became…attached to them, and while I knew that the whole idea was to get their father back, a part of me imagined what might happen if I couldn’t – taking them away, starting a new life, an honest one, somewhere far away from Regina. Still, I knew I had to try freeing their father first.

“In the end, I managed it, but not for some time, and at much greater cost than I had imagined. The heist at the Deville mansion went wrong. I made away with the money, but while I’d planned carefully for a time she would be away, one of her dogs alerted the household and I wound up killing a member of her security staff in getting away, after being shot myself.

“I suppose Ava would eventually have learned the truth in any case, but by the time I got home, I was delirious, and apparently in a confessional mood. She used a small part of what I had taken to pay someone at a nearby tavern with some medical skill to tend to me. When I came around, it was to her telling me that she and Nicholas were leaving for the orphanage, that I was a villain and they wouldn’t take my money.

“The man at Deville’s was the first I had killed outside of Regina’s army, and even now, still probably the closest to an innocent. Deville was a dirty piece of work, and I doubt the toughs she surrounded herself with were overburdened by scruples – he shot at me as I was already fleeing – but he was doing a job, and at least wasn’t likely to be any worse a man than I had been while working for Regina, or since.

“I was desperate for it to mean something, and desperate, too, to help Ava and Nicholas, even if they had rejected me. But they had also rejected my money, and I couldn’t very well pay their father’s way out of prison myself. I had to find a way to get them the money without their knowing it was me. And that’s when I had the idea of inventing Robin Hood, the noble thief that Ava had believed me to be.

“At one of the various dens of iniquity I’d taken to spending my time, I had gotten to know a man named August Booth, a struggling writer, and an utter scoundrel. I proposed a deal to him: I would give him half of my ill-gotten gains, for the foreseeable future, if he would help me spread tales of Robin of Loxley through the more sensationalistic branches of the underground press that had begun to spring up amidst Regina’s crackdowns. But Booth convinced me that it couldn’t be all fabrication; the best lies had some truth to them. Plus, I understood myself that Ava was a smart enough little thing that if she wound up with a pile of money too soon after leaving me, she’d see through it at once. And so, at taverns, and inns, and the little villages I had taken to lying low in, I began taking note of likely objects of charity. My hook made me too conspicuous to deliver myself, so Booth generally did the hand-offs, disguised, so that anyone who glimpsed him would just report having seen a young and vaguely attractive man leaving packs of loot where it was most needed.

“You know the stories yourself. Like most of the worst about me, most of the best about Robin were the furthest from the truth. After the stories began to catch on, it didn’t even take August to keep them going – good thing, as a few years in, he disappeared with a particularly large sum I had asked him to deliver, and I never saw him again. But before then, about a year after I had last seen them, Booth left a parcel at the orphanage with enough money to free Ava and Nicholas’s father, signed with the mark of Robin Hood.

“Again, I don’t want you to think that I had changed completely. Only a fraction of “Robin Hood’s” activities had to be real for him to get a reputation, and I still kept plenty for myself, especially once I’d gotten the money to Ava. In some ways, I even became worse. Starting with the night at Corrine Deville’s, what I still called a campaign against Regina descended into the more general thuggery it was. And I _enjoyed_ it, began to like playing the dashing villain. But even as Hook, things had become somewhat more complicated.

"I don’t know if anyone figured out my game completely, but as the years went on, a few of the savvier denizens of Sherwood, especially the ones who really _were_ involved in underground movements against Regina, realized that if you didn’t have time to wait for Robin to leave his winnings at your door, you could go to the Captain and sometimes prevail on him to help you, whether what you needed was the collateral to keep your home or enough cash to bribe your way across the border. In time, I developed something of a network of my own, to keep me apprised of developments in the forest. It was from one of them that I learned about you. And you know the rest.”

And Hook fell silent, waiting for her judgment.

*****

Emma didn’t say anything for some time. How could she?

The man in front of her had done unforgiveable things. If this were a courtroom, in a just world, his crimes would be fully enough to condemn him. Yet this was not a courtroom, and the world they lived in was not just.

This was not a courtroom. There were no punishments to dole out, no sentences to hand down. Even so, she knew instinctively, he was asking her to be his judge. His judge, not in the petty sense of human law, but in as close as humans could come to something like the divine weighing of so many mythologies, where the totality of the evil a man had done could be balanced against the good. Where the gods might look past the deeds of a man’s hand and find a heart lighter than a feather.

Emma certainly wasn’t a goddess. What he was asking of her wasn’t fair, wasn’t in her power to grant. But he had asked it, had laid his heart on the scale, and there was no one else to do the weighing.

How to judge? He had fought honorably for a bad cause; had killed lawlessly for a good one. How many people had he hurt, and how many had he helped; how many lives had he taken, and how many had he saved? Did it matter that his anger had been righteous? Did it matter that his victims’ own hands may not have been fully clean? They, too, had deserved a more measured judge than a bullet in the dark.

Ava had, in her way, once been where Emma was. Had weighed the killing of the guard on one hand, and the selfless effort to free her father on the other, and found that she could not make the scales balance, no matter how desperately she must have wished to. But Ava was a child. Emma was not.

A child could pass judgment, or a goddess. Emma was neither. She couldn’t answer the questions she had asked. Maybe no one could.

But she found that she knew one thing: the man in front of her at this moment was not a bad man. And perhaps that was all she needed to decide. There was just one other question to be asked.

“Hook,” she said softly. “What’s your name?”

“Killian,” he said, his voice cracking. “Killian Jones.”

She held out her hand and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Killian. I’m Emma Nolan. Would you like to help me overthrow the Evil Queen?”

He reached for her hand, and grabbed it like a lifeline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line about a god weighing a heart and finding it lighter than a feather is a reference to Egyptian mythology, specifically the myth of Anubis and the feather of Ma'at. If you were, like me, a child of the late 80s/early 90s, you might have first encountered this myth through a delightful Sesame Street straight- to-VHS movie called "Don't Eat the Pictures."
> 
> I hesitated about allowing Hook such a long monologue, but in the end decided that it was important enough to his character and to the story to be worth it. One of the difficulties of writing a redeemed villain is figuring out how to make him bad enough to really need redemption without making him too bad to be plausibly redeemed. I didn't always think that [em]Once[/em] did the greatest job with this, and in Hook's case, the writers sometimes hedged their bets by simply not giving us a clear idea of exactly how far his crimes extended (were the stories of how he got his rings describing the worst few things he had ever done, or was that pretty much his MO?). There's plenty I'm going to have to take liberties with in this story -- if you're looking for the logistics of how Hook manages his heists, I'm sorry to disappoint you -- but on this point, I thought it was crucial to be specific.


	5. Granny's

Of course, it was easier to make a grand declaration than to follow through on one. Emma had never been quite so naïve as to believe that she was going to become the leader of some sort of revolutionary movement; that’s why she had been looking for Robin Hood in the first place. To the extent that she’d had any real idea of a plan, it had been to _join_ Robin while using her status as Emma Nolan to become a symbolic rallying point for the resistance. And while Killian might have been behind some of the Robin Hood mythology, he quickly made it clear that her notions of a rag-tag rebel band in the forest had been vastly inflated.

“Most people around these parts are just trying to survive,” he explained. “We get the odd political sort, but nothing organized.”

“Nothing organized _yet,_ ” said Emma, more confidently than she felt.

Killian didn’t respond immediately. When he did, it was with a note of hesitation.

“Swan, I said I’d help you, and I will, in any way you need. But – I need you to know that if you decide it’s what you want, I can still get you back to your parents. No ransom,” he added with a wry shadow of his old smirk. “You can start writing again. Do some good that way.”

“I’m not going to cut and run,” said Emma, firmly.

“I’ve met plenty of good people who have,” said Killian. “And seen others pay for staying.”

“You’re still here,” Emma noted.

“True enough, lass, but remember, I don’t pay for anything,” he said, defusing the gravity of the moment.  

“Hey, until a week ago, I was using my parents’ credit card,” said Emma. “So I guess I’ve never really paid for anything either.”

“We’ll trust to honor among thieves, then,” he said. “But if you are staying, we have to move at dark. If Regina’s men are still after you, it isn’t safe to stay in one place for too long.”

“Guess I should enjoy the mattress and running water while I have it.” If this was how Killian lived after he’d been stationary for a while, Emma didn’t want to think about what his version of moving into a fixer-upper would look like.

“Don’t worry,” he said, and began placing his very few portable possessions into a large backpack. “We’ll have to go back to roughing it eventually, but for now, I think hiding in plain sight may be our best option.”

“Plain sight?” She still didn’t know exactly which of the stories about Hook’s exploits were true, and for all she knew, he was about to suggest camping out on Regina’s front lawn.

 “Just you wait, Swan,” he said, cryptically. “To grandmother’s house we go.”

*****

“Grandmother’s house,” it turned out, was an inn called Granny’s. From the outside, it might once have been a place that Emma’s mother would have called “quaint” or “charming,” but even in the dark it was evident those days were long behind it. At several places around the exterior, whole rows of shingles had come off, and incongruous patches of thatching seemed to be compensating for several similar spots on the roof. The letters on the sign out front had become so faded that it now read “Gany’s.

Killian, however, did not take Emma to the front door, instead rapping his hook on one of the windows in the back. Emma thought the glass might have cracked slightly, but the window was so dirty it was hard to tell. Through it, she could hear the sounds of what she had been in college long enough to recognize as a lot of very drunk people.

A woman Emma guessed was in her seventies opened the window, her hair fixed behind her in a bun and her expression fixed in front in a scowl. Her eyes slid from Killian to Emma and back.

“Hook, I _told_ you not to come back here!”

“You were angry,” he said lightly, “I didn’t think it fair to hold you to your word.”

Granny was immune to his charms. “It isn’t safe!” she hissed, and made as if to close the window. Before she could, Hook stuck his hand through, arresting her arm.

“What, afraid Regina will revoke your liquor license?” he said.

“You’re not that stupid, Captain,” she replied. “And neither am I. Even if I were inclined to let you in, do you think I don’t know who she is?”

Emma, without knowing precisely what she intended to say, opened her mouth to protest, but a sharp tap of Killian’s boot to her foot stopped her. He drew a chain carrying one of Emma’s rings from around his neck.

“Then you know that I’m not likely to be lying when I say that _this_ is real sapphire,” he said. “It’s yours for a week’s lodging.”

She seemed to be considering it. “Three nights,” she finally returned.

Killian pulled the chain back, but not out of the range of Granny’s sight. “When have I ever given you the impression that I’m a man who’s willing to bargain?” he asked. Though there was no overt threat in the words, Emma knew from a certain hardness that had crept into his voice that it was Hook, not Killian, who was speaking.

Emma could almost see the old woman’s calculations on her face. “Deal,” she finally said. “But this one,” she continued, nodding her head towards Emma, “doesn’t leave the room until Ruby’s had a chance to dye those feathers.”

“Deal,” said Emma, tired of being talked over, and hopped onto the ledge, and into Granny’s kitchen, leaving Killian to make his own way behind her.

*****

Having walked for hours, Emma and Killian went to sleep almost immediately upon being ushered hastily into their room by Granny. Killian had hesitated for a moment, eying the chair, but Emma patted the space beside her with an exhausted “Don’t be an idiot, Hook,” and he lay down without further comment. Emma watched surreptitiously as he stripped to the waist and then unstrapped the harness connecting his hook to his body, laying the prosthetic on the end table. It was the first time she had seen him without it, and there was something startling about watching the silver weapon stripped away to expose the shortened arm beneath.  

They were awoken in the morning by a knock. Killian quickly reattached his hook and opened the door without asking who it was, apparently, confident that Regina’s troops wouldn’t have bothered asking for permission.

“Ruby!” exclaimed Hook, quickly embracing the woman who walked in with what looked like real affection.

“Special delivery,” she said when they broke apart, gesturing to the picnic basket she carried.

“Aren’t you getting a bit old for the little innocent act?” said Killian, and Emma could see what he meant. It wasn’t just her age, either. Ruby, who was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, was wearing boots that went almost to her thigh and the shortest skirt Emma thought she had ever seen. Her top button was undone, showing more than a hint of ample cleavage.

She smirked. “Judging by the reactions I’ve been getting, I think I’m just growing into it, actually.”

She turned to Emma. “Granny tells me you need a makeover,” she said. Emma wasn’t a prude, but looking at Ruby, she was slightly nervous as to what her version of a “makeover” would entail.

Ruby seemed to sense Emma’s anxiety. “Relax,” she said. “I’m really just here to do your hair. Let’s get you in front of the mirror.”

Once she did, Emma was surprised when Ruby produced what she recognized as real hair dye, not the spray-on stuff you picked up at the pharmacy. “Where did you get that?” she said. Regina had levied exorbitant taxes on every item that she had deemed a “luxury,” by which she meant practically everything that wasn’t food or the most basic clothing. That dye couldn’t have come cheap.

“Ruby’s a…delivery girl,” explained Killian. “She’s quite resourceful.”

Ruby snorted. “I’m a delivery girl like he’s a trash collector,” she said to Emma, who had to think about it for a moment before she caught their meaning. “You’re a smuggler?” she said.

“Since I was a kid,” said Ruby proudly. “The picnic basket was too nice a touch to give up.”  

Ruby kept up a steady stream of mostly one-sided conversation as she worked on Emma’s hair, talking about the strangest items she had been asked to procure (requests for various sex toys were a common theme), suppliers she had had to wheedle, and fashions she had managed to copy by dint of careful black-market scavenging. Knowing who Emma was, she peppered her with questions about various designers and celebrities, most of which Emma couldn’t answer, to Ruby’s disappointment. At some point, Emma realized that “Granny” actually was Ruby’s real grandmother.

“She doesn’t mind about your, um, job?” asked Emma.

“Are you kidding?” said Ruby. “It’s practically the only thing we _don’t_ fight about. She didn’t like it, the first time she had to send me out, but she was proud of how good I was at it. Kind of relieved too, I think. Running this place, it isn’t like she doesn’t know there’s a lot worse I could be doing. At least this way, she figures, I can always take care of myself.”

Emma didn’t press for a further explanation. She wondered, suddenly, where Ruby’s parents were, but even as sheltered as her own upbringing had been, she had lived under Regina’s rule for long enough to know better than to ask.

When Ruby was done, Emma’s hair was short and jet black, disconcertingly like her mother’s. It felt strange to Emma, but she had to admit that the difference it made to her appearance was startling enough to serve their purposes; while it wouldn’t stand up to careful scrutiny, everyone knew that Emma Nolan was a blonde with long, flowing hair, and most people – as she’d been given other reasons to observe this week – didn’t look too hard past first appearances.

“What do you think, Hook?” said Ruby, and it occurred to Emma that the smuggler might have gotten the wrong impression about their relationship.

Killian seemed to have had the same thought, as he sounded embarrassed when he replied, “Black suits you, Swan.”

“You think black suits everything,” Emma said, gesturing to his clothing. “But now that I’m done, how about we go down and meet the neighbors?

*****

Killian had, for some reason, been surprised by her intention to go down and mingle. Hadn’t the whole point of disguising herself, she noted, been precisely so that Emma could interact with other people without giving away her identity?

 “It can be a pretty rough group,” said Killian doubtfully. “Are you sure you’re up to it? We have the week; there’s no rush.”

“If I’m going to have a chance at influencing any of these people, I have to get to know them first,” Emma reasoned. “Plus, that’s why I have you. They all see me come down with you, no one’s going to want to mess with me.”

 “They won’t mess with you because I’ll beat anyone who tries bloody before he gets the chance,” said Killian darkly. “But” – he looked away – “I should warn you that this…isn’t the first time many of them will have seen me with a woman. Seeing us together, they might just assume --”

Emma rolled her eyes. “I think I can handle the insult to my virtue,” she said.  

It was only early afternoon, but the bar downstairs seemed scarcely less packed than it had sounded last night; apparently, Granny’s patrons weren’t living 9-5 kinds of lives. A few people spared Emma a look, but more reacted to the sight of Killian, animated, voluble conversations turning to urgent whispers and furtive glances as they realized that Captain Hook was in their midst.

Killian didn’t react, steering Emma toward a group of men playing cards. “Mind if I join?” he said. It wasn’t really a request, and the players moved aside. They were playing poker, Emma saw.

“Well don’t leave me out,” said Emma.

Killian raised his eyebrows. “You play poker?” he said. “Are you any good?”

Emma smiled. “I guess you’re about to find out.”

Emma, it so happened, was _very_ good at poker, and by the time she walked away, they were up a couple of hundred bucks, and Killian was looking at her with frank admiration.

“Look at you,” he said. “An honest day’s work. Too bad, too. You would have done even better if you’d hustled them.”

She thwacked him on the nose with the wad of bills. “You have this skill, you don’t need to hustle.” They sat down at an empty table, and signaled a waitress to come and take their order. Almost as soon as she had left, however, Killian jumped up. “I’m sorry, lass, there’s a man over there I have to see.”

“No problem,” said Emma. As he walked off, she intensified her study of the room and its inhabitants, noticing some features that had escaped her observation in her absorption in the game.

There were no clocks in the bar, and no windows. Emma knew it had been afternoon when she entered, and didn’t think she had played for long enough for it to have grown dark, but in the dim room, it was hard to tell. The whole inn seemed to be lit by candles rather than electricity, and while Emma had first taken this for an atmospheric choice, she now realized that in all probability, this place was, quite literally, off the grid. No one, she confirmed, scanning the room, had a phone out, and while Emma had of course abandoned her own before running off, and had known intellectually that many people were now too poor to afford one, it seemed unnatural to be in a social space in which they weren’t a ubiquitous feature.

Last night, Emma had compared the sounds of the room to a frat party. But as she continued her observation, the similarity faded. Being a drunken fool in college was practically a rite of passage, but many of the men and scattered women around the room were her parents’ age or older. A fight had broken out in one corner of the room, and no one even seemed particularly interested; the short, stocky man who at first appeared to have the upper hand was so unsteady on his feet that his next punch not only missed entirely, it unbalanced him, and he fell to the floor. He didn’t get up, and Emma wondered if she should go check on him. There was no music, no dancing, no illusion that these people had come to do anything but get very, very drunk. Even the card players, she now saw, didn’t seem to really be enjoying themselves. There was an avid, desperate look on most of their faces, and she suddenly felt ashamed about the pleasure she had taken in her own win. At least Hook normally took from the rich.

Speaking of Hook, where had he gone? It had been several minutes by now. He was no longer talking to the man he had initially gone to find, Emma saw. She scanned the room again, and found him at another table, throwing back shots with two other men. He, at least seemed to be having a good time. When the waitress came back with another round, he gestured for her to join them, and when she, presumably, pointed out the lack of space, he grabbed her around the waist and settled her in his lap. From her reaction, she was neither surprised nor upset by this turn of events.

And suddenly, it was all too much. What was she doing here? Two weeks ago, Emma had been sitting in macroeconomics and political theory classes, feeling very bold about writing a stupid blog as she went home to a huge house where servants catered to every need her doting parents didn’t already supply. This…was not her world. It was Hook’s. And while she still trusted him to protect her, she hadn’t left home to be a burden. But what good was she, to him or to any of these people?

Apparently, her distress was visible, because when the waitress came with her food, she sat down across from Emma, greeting her with a sympathetic, “You new here, honey?” Her tone was motherly, though she probably wasn’t much older than Emma herself.

“Yeah,” said Emma. “Just…a lot to take in.”

“You’ll get used to it,” said the waitress. Emma wasn’t sure that this was as comforting as she seemed to think it was, but appreciated her intentions. “I remember how strange it was when I first came here. I’m Ashley,” she added.

“Leia,” said Emma, using the name that she had decided on, for no particular reason, before leaving the room.

“You came down with Hook, didn’t you?” asked Ashley.

“Yes,” said Emma. “I…uh, met up with him on the road.”

Given Hook’s reputation, she wasn’t sure how this would be received, but Ashley was unperturbed. “You’ll be OK with him,” she said. “He’s actually a pretty good guy.”

“I know,” Emma started to say, but Ashley hadn’t finished, cutting her off with a light “as long as you’re not expecting too much in the way of fidelity.”

“Oh,” said Emma automatically, “It’s not like that.”

“Sure its not. But seriously, don’t worry, it’s not like I have any room to judge.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Emma, hoping to shift the conversation. Honestly, it was probably safer if people did think she was just Hook’s latest fling, but whatever she had said earlier, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the inference.

“Almost five years now,” said Ashley. “Since just before my daughter was born.”

It didn’t take much encouragement for the story to come out. Ashley had been the maid for a rich family (she wouldn’t say which, and Emma wondered if she knew them, if she and Ashley had maybe even crossed paths before, the heiress and the servant who could never have imagined their lives would one day intersect in a dingy forest inn). When she had gotten pregnant by one of the sons of the household, the family had wanted her to have an abortion. When she refused, they threatened to have the baby taken from her as soon as it was born, worried that Ashley or her child might otherwise make embarrassing – and expensive – claims on them one day. They were powerful enough that Ashley had decided she wasn’t taking any chances.

Once Ashley had begun, it was easy to get her to keep talking about her daughter Alexandra. The two apparently lived at Granny’s, Ashley working for their room and board. “You can meet her later,” said Ashley. “One of the other girls watches her during my shifts.”

Emma had just begun to really relax into the friendly conversation when a man approached the table from behind Ashley, laying a hand on her shoulder. He was very overweight and was, to Emma’s surprise, sporting a cross necklace and a cleric’s collar.

“My child,” he said sternly. “Have you yet repented of your wicked ways?”

Ashley turned, and Emma didn’t miss the way her expression changed for a moment to one of disgust and maybe even a little bit of fear before she arranged her face into a beatific smile.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” she said, as if reciting from a book.

“Not to worry,” he said, his own gaze becoming decidedly less saintly. “I’ll assign you your penance.” And to Emma’s consternation, Ashley got up to follow him without a backwards glance.

Emma, after only a moment’s stunned indecision, ran after them. “Excuse me, father,” she said to the priest, laying an ironic emphasis on the last word, “I need to borrow Ashley for a moment.”

When they were out of his earshot, Emma said “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I actually do,” said Ashley, with some annoyance. “Granny pays me in room and board. That’s not enough.”

Emma went for her wallet, and took out the two hundred dollars she had won earlier that day. “Take this,” she said. “Please. I don’t need it.”

Strangely, Ashley’s voice seemed to carry compassion for _Emma_ when she responded. “And what about next week, and the week after that?” She held up her index finger, gesturing for the priest to keep waiting. “He’s a good customer, Leia, and I won’t be someone’s charity case.” Before she turned away, she added “Still want to meet Alexandra some time?” She sounded suddenly vulnerable, and Emma forced her own voice back into firmness when she replied.

“Of course. See you later.”

When she got back to the table, another woman was sitting there. She, was young, and pretty, but her eyes were slightly glassy, and Emma could see traces of a fine white powder on the sleeve of her green dress.

“Thought you were going to be a savior, did you?” she taunted. “Don’t worry, Friar Tuck will take care of her.”

“Is he really a priest?” asked Emma, deciding to ignore the woman’s obvious hostility.

“Hell if I know,” she said, shrugging. “If he is, though, I’d say he’s been defrocked. Again, and again, and again.”

As there was no good reply to this, Emma tried “What’s your name?”

“They call me Tink,” said the woman. She leaned over, lowering her voice. “And I know what they call you, too.”

Emma looked around, alarmed, but no one was in earshot. Tink kept speaking, holding Emma’s gaze with a grim intensity that Emma wouldn’t have believed her capable of a moment earlier.

“Didn’t know that Hook had taken to _keeping_ rich bitches, but word of advice, _Rebel Swan_. Don’t think you’re going to come in here and change anything. Or anyone,” she said, nodding toward where Hook was still drinking and laughing with a few others. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots, and not every hooker has a heart of gold.” She gave Emma a rather nasty smile as she made to leave. “And on that note, I’ve got to get to work. Hope slumming with the little people is everything you hoped it would be.”

As soon as she was out of sight, Emma ran back to the room. She had seen quite enough of the neighborhood for the day.

*****

Killian extricated himself from the group about an hour after he had seen Swan run back upstairs after what he suspected had not been a pleasant conversation with Tink. He hoped she wouldn’t be too angry with him; he knew he had acted an utter cad, and of course he couldn’t very well have explained himself in advance. If he was lucky, she’d give him a chance to explain now before starting in on him.

But whatever reaction he had expected, it wasn’t the one he got. Emma was lying on the bed, and didn’t respond to his greeting. When she sat up and he got a look at her face, he thought he could see the traces of tears, though her voice was icy calm when she spoke.

“Have you ever given any money to Ashley?” she asked. It took him a moment to remember which one Ashley was. When he placed her, at first, he thought she was asking if he had ever… _paid_ for Ashley, but then she said. “Robin Hood, prince of thieves, friend of the poor. Ever thrown some prizes her way?”

“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t think I have.”

“What about Tink?” she went on. “Or are whores not eligible for the five-finger discount?”

“Any money I might have given to Tink would have disappeared up her nose,” he answered, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice. He had expected, even hoped that Granny’s would give her a slightly more realistic view of the world. He hadn’t wanted to crush her completely. He sighed. “What’s this about, Swan? You know I can’t support the entire forest.”

The anger left her voice, replaced with a hollow exhaustion that he thought was worse. “I know,” she said. “Its just – Henry and I, we were so convinced that we were bringing people hope. That that was what they most needed.”

“Sometimes, hope isn’t enough,” he said gently.

“You’re telling me.”

“But,” he continued, though he was perhaps the least qualified person in the world to give her this message, “That doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.”

She raised her head from where she had lowered it again, and he went on. “Did you stop to think about why Regina allows Granny’s to stay open?”

She shook her head.

“She’s not paying taxes, has no license, the inn, as you’ve learned, doubles as a brothel, and at least half the people here are wanted for one thing or another. Regina could close this place down today, and it would be one of the _most_ justifiable things she’d ever done. But she doesn’t. And” he added, as he didn’t think she could be disillusioned much further than she already was, “it isn’t because she’s scared of me, or Robin Hood, or anyone else. Its because, at the end of the day, she knows we aren’t any real threat to her, and she’d rather let a bunch of malcontents and outlaws drink and screw themselves into oblivion in the middle of the forest than risk someone waking up for long enough to really cause trouble for her.

“But Regina is wrong,” said Killian, though he isn’t sure he would have believed it himself only days earlier. “People don’t only matter if they’re going to overthrow a government. Maybe a gift from Robin Hood means a girl has a couple more years to be a child before she makes her way to Granny’s back room. Maybe something you wrote convinced someone to be a little more decent to someone else, or a little bit braver, or just made them _happy,_ for at least a few moments.”

“It still isn’t enough,” said Emma, her voice catching.

“I know,” said Killian. “It isn’t supposed to be enough.” He reached for her hand, and she allowed him to take it. “But,” he said, “sometimes, it’s all we have.”

And, for tonight, at least, it would have to do.


	6. Learning

Killian was already up and pacing the small room when Emma awoke the next morning. Before she could even wish him a good morning, he said “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” she said, sitting up and pulling a brush through her hair. She had forgotten how much shorter it was now, and the movement felt unnatural.

He pulled up a chair to sit facing her. “The Queen’s put out a bounty on you,” he said.

“What?” She sprang up, puzzled by Killian’s apparent lack of urgency. “Doesn’t that mean we have to leave? Like, now?”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “We already knew she was after you, so this doesn’t really change anything. Just makes it more official.”

“Which means everyone _else_ now has reason to go after me for the reward,” she objected.

“As far as I know, no one knows who you are except Granny and Ruby, and we can trust them,” said Killian. “Granny won’t be happy – you saw yesterday that she doesn’t like to try Regina’s patience too far --but she wouldn’t tell. Most of them wouldn’t, actually.”

“Honor among thieves?” guessed Emma, skeptically.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Killian. “But it isn't only that. All of these people have a reason for being here. Whatever those reasons are, they usually aren’t ones that involve great amounts of affection for or trust in the Queen. I would prefer not to test the theory, so it’s best if no one else learns who you are, but I think staying is a reasonable risk. Out here, not everyone’s going to even hear about the reward.”

“How did you?” she asked.

“Heard it off Alan Dale, the man I went to speak to yesterday,” Killian said. “He’s a street musician, tends to get out more than most around these parts.”

The man Killian had spoken to before abandoning Emma, apparently without a care in the world. Did that mean…? She wanted to ask, but it felt too petty. Fortunately, Killian relieved her of the need.

“That’s why I didn’t come straight back to the table,” he confirmed. “I’d had to ask him for news of you directly. If he’d seen me sit right down at a table with a strange woman, he might have made connections I’d prefer he didn’t. He wasn’t staying the night; we’ll be fine now.”

Emma, more relieved than the information warranted, sat back down on the bed, before remembering something else. How could she have been so stupid?

“Tink knows,” she said with a sense of dread.

 “Does she?” Killian responded. “I wonder how she figured it out.” Inexplicably, he seemed almost _pleased_ by the news, more impressed by evidence of Tink’s cleverness than concerned about a potential threat. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Tink might as soon spit in your face as look at you, but she’s no informer.”

Recalling the woman’s bitter contempt, Emma wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t make an exception, but she decided to be optimistic and defer to Killian’s judgment. There was something else, however, that was bothering her.

“What I really don’t get is why Regina is doing this,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t actually _done_ anything since leaving home. If she wasn’t going to publicly name me as a traitor then, what’s changed?”

Killian sighed. “I don’t actually think you’re the target here, Swan.”

Not the target? Then who…

“My parents,” she realized. “Regina wants something from them, and she’s using me as leverage.”

“That’s my guess,” said Killian.

Emma, not for the first time in the past week, felt a renewed respect for her parents. If it had only taken Regina a matter of days to change the narrative on Emma from stupid runaway to treasonous outlaw, her mother and father really must have pissed her off. But it did raise the stakes. If Regina actually managed to capture Emma, she was sure that her parents would agree to almost anything to save her. The thought was troubling, and Emma brushed it aside for now.

“One more question,” she said to Killian. “How much?”

“What?” he said, possibly thrown by her abrupt change in tone.

“How much is she offering?”

Killian laughed. “Ten thousand,” he said. “But don’t get too cocky, Swan. My price is twenty.”

“Now you tell me,” she said with a mock sigh. “If I’d known that before I was a wanted woman, I might have considered it.”

He laughed again, and Emma got ready to meet the day.

*****

The second day at Granny’s went much better than the first. Chastened by her earlier missteps, Emma deliberately hung back in conversation, learning what she could from the people around her, and from Killian’s occasional interjections with what he knew of various patrons’ histories. The short man she had seen drunkenly fighting the other day, for instance, had drawn Regina’s ire after the construction crew he led somehow bungled a job she’d hired them for. His misfortunes had apparently soured his disposition, as he met her tentative question about how he was feeling with a sharp “What’s it to you, sister?” and turned away. Emma had more success with several other members of his old team, who joked pleasantly with her about the architectural atrocity that was Granny’s.

Later in the day, Ashley – sporting several red marks on her neck that Emma tried hard to avoid looking at – introduced Emma to her daughter, an adorable little girl who seemed blissfully unaware of anything irregular or troubling in her mode of existence. When a man only feet from them vomited on the floor, Alexandra confidentially informed Emma that mommy said the food at Granny’s sometimes made people sick. Eventually, Ruby joined them as well, sporting several red marks on _her_ neck that Emma suspected had been far more pleasurably acquired.

Emma offered to watch Alexandra when Ashley had to leave for her next shift, but Ashley said she already had it covered. Emma found out the identity of her babysitter later, when Killian took her to meet the Darling children, one of whom was the boy she had seen him with in the woods. The oldest, Wendy, was about fifteen, and from the conversation that followed, Emma guessed that she was who Killian had had in mind when he had referred to girls saved from Granny’s back room thanks to a little cash from Robin Hood. Wendy and her brothers John and Michael, however, obviously knew who paid for the room they shared at the inn, and Killian seemed more relaxed in their company than he had been around almost anyone else he had introduced her to. Emma tried not to remember that Killian’s reference to Wendy had included the belief that his charity was only delaying her eventual move to more profitable occupations than babysitting.

That evening, when Emma finished up in the bathroom before bed, she returned to the room to find Killian dressed to go out, his leather jacket on and a traveling satchel slung on his shoulder. When she asked him where he was going, he briefly answered “Work,” scratching behind his ear in what Emma had come to recognize as a gesture of embarrassment.

Emma couldn’t help her immediate unease, though she shouldn’t have been surprised. Obviously, Killian wasn’t going to stop stealing. _Couldn’t,_ actually, even if he had wanted to.

“Couldn’t you sell the last of my jewelry?” she finally asked.

“I thought we’d better save that for an emergency,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything…ambitious. But we need some supplies for when we leave here, even apart from anything else.”

“Okay,” said Emma after a few moments, coming to a decision.

“Okay?” repeated Killian, clearly expecting more resistance.

“I mean, I don’t love it, but, we kind of don’t have a lot of choice.” She took a breath, and went on. “But, I do have some…. conditions.” Which she had no right to impose, really, but somehow, she knew Killian wasn’t going to call her on the hypocrisy. “When you get back, we’re going to sit down, and _talk_ about where the money is going. Set aside what we need for ourselves, put another portion towards whatever you give to the Darlings and anyone else you’re… _supporting_ , and then figure out the rest. I was thinking maybe we could give some to Granny to divide among the waitresses.” She had remembered Killian’s story of why he had first invented Robin Hood, to get the money to Ava. If Ashley wouldn’t take charity, she couldn’t be offended by a bonus from her employer.

Killian, apparently not at all perturbed by her presumption, smiled. “Are we plotting armed robbery or setting up a charitable foundation?”

“Apparently, both” said Emma. Her parents, she thought wryly, would be so proud. “But that brings me to my second condition. I want you to unload your gun.”

Killian was far less amused by this. “Are you _trying_ to get me killed?”

“No,” said Emma calmly, “I’m giving you enough credit to think you can manage what has to be a cake run for you without needing to fire off a deadly weapon.”

“I wouldn’t use it unless I really had to,” he protested, sounding hurt. “You know that.”

“I do,” said Emma. “And I’m not stupid. If you were going up against the Queen’s men, I’d _want_ you armed. But it’s practically impossible for anyone not working directly for Regina to get a gun permit these days. You’re not going to wind up under fire holding up some yuppies on the side of the road or cleaning out a convenience store. But you walk into a situation with a loaded gun, and there’s a chance it winds up going off.” She got closer, putting her hand on the arm that ended in his hook. “I just – I know you know what you’re doing. And I know that it isn’t fair for me to ask. But if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to be living off stolen money, if I’m going to be responsible for what happens with it, I have to at least know someone’s not going to get killed to get it.”

Silently, he took his gun from the holster, and left the cartridge in her hand before walking out the door.

*****

It was a mark of how rapidly her life had changed, thought Emma, that it now felt strange to wake up without Killian nearby. She had half-expected him to be back before dawn, but figured that unless he had worked _very_ quickly last night, he would have had to take shelter somewhere during the day before returning after dark.  

That gave Emma some time to put her own plans into action. Killian’s methods as Robin Hood, she inferred, had been mostly haphazard; he caught a rumor of some sufficiently pressing need somewhere, and left a pile of money on a doorstep. If Emma wanted to be more systematic, she was going to have to gather some information.

At first, Emma had thought of Ashley, but of course that wouldn’t work; she specifically _didn’t_ want Ashley to know that Emma was dispensing anything she might see as charity (or, Emma thought uncomfortably, ill-gotten gains; possibly, Ashley’s ethical sense was more refined on that point than Emma’s own had become). Ruby was the next obvious choice, but for some reason, Emma’s mind kept turning to another possibility.

Ruby dealt in needs that were comparatively easy to satisfy; someone put in an order, and she found a way to fulfill it. It was in keeping with her apparent attitude toward her own life. By any objective standard, even Ruby lived a life of considerable privation, but she appeared to have the gift of learning not to want much more than her own efforts could attain. Tink, thought Emma, recalling her pinched face and glassy stare, was a woman who seemed to understand too well a different kind of desire, and the difficulty of finding any satisfying way of compensating for its lack.

It didn’t take long to find Tink at the bar. They hadn’t spoken yesterday, though Emma had caught the other woman eyeing her a few times. “Hey, Tink,” Emma said, sliding into the chair next to hers. “I want to talk.”

Predictably, Tink was not impressed. “Tough,” she sniffed.

Emma had been prepared for this. It was a gamble, but she needed to try something drastic, and if it didn’t work, she could always go back to her earlier idea and talk to Ruby. “I can pay,” she said, taking out the two hundred dollars she had tried to offer Ashley two days earlier.

“What?” Emma was pleased to see that she had at least surprised Tink out of her general air of contemptuous boredom.

“You’re a whore,” said Emma bluntly. “I’m buying your time.”

It looked like Emma’s risk was paying off. Tink actually looked interested, less, Emma thought, in the money than in Emma’s manner in offering it. Poor little rich girls didn’t act like this.

Seeming to sense she had lost the upper hand, Tink affected unconcern with a brusque “Alright, then,” as she led Emma to one of rooms that apparently served the members of Granny’s de facto bordello. It was more or less identical to the other rooms, but with even less lighting and – Emma was rather relieved to see – a bowl full of condoms on the nightstand.

“So, talk,” said Tink. “Unless that was just a euphemism,” she added, with a smirk, planting herself on the bed, legs splayed out in front of her.

 “I have a deal for you,” Emma began, not taking the bait. “From what Killian says, I gather you don’t miss much that goes on around here.” She felt slightly guilty about revealing Killian’s real name, which she was fairly sure no one at Granny’s knew except herself – he had cut her off with some alarm when she had almost let it slip in front of the Darlings – but it was a calculated choice. Using it established Emma’s credibility, and placed a certain amount of trust in Tink herself. “You know who he is, right?”

 “Everyone knows Captain Hook,” Tink said sardonically. “But yeah,” she admitted, “I know who he is.”

“Then let’s just say I’m interested in expanding his operations. I want to help, and I think you’re better placed than either of us to figure out the best way to do it. So here’s the deal: you let me know, about anyone you hear of in need of money – or,” she amended quickly, “in more need of money than usual, and you get a five percent cut of whatever we wind up handing out.”

Tink looked at her appraisingly. “And what if I told you that I was gonna take that five percent and spend every bit of it on pixie dust?”

“I wouldn’t like it,” said Emma, honestly. “But it’s not my call.”

Tink, after a moment, hopped off the bed and toward the door. “I’ll think about it,” she said, but Emma was fairly confident that this time, she had won the round.

*****

Killian didn’t return until well after midnight. Emma stayed up, her nerves getting to her in spite of herself. He’d been doing this for a long time, and the chances of anything going wrong were vanishingly small, but this was new to Emma, and she couldn’t help but worry. Especially as she’d persuaded him to go out comparatively undefended.

He entered the room quietly, evidently not expecting to find her awake. “You’re back!” she said unnecessarily, and moved to hug him briefly in greeting. Wherever he had spent the day, there obviously hadn’t been a shower on premises, and she instructed him to wash up with an exaggerated grimace. When he returned to the room, she asked, somewhat hesitantly, “How did it go?”

“Fine,” he said shortly, apparently not inclined to go into detail, though whether it was for his sake or her own, Emma didn’t know. “I got enough for what we need, and more.” He sat down on the bed, making to undo his boots, but he had already removed his hook, and was struggling to do it one handed.

Since the first night that Emma had seen Killian without his hook, he had taken it off almost immediately every time they returned to their own room. At first, Emma had thought that perhaps it was more comfortable for him, but his obvious unease doing certain tasks without the prosthetic made her suspect that there was more to it. She had decided not to comment, but now, for the first time, she moved to help, wordlessly kneeling to assist him with the laces. “Thank you, Swan,” he said quietly.

The moment was broken by a knock at the door. Emma answered it, taking care to give Killian enough time to reattach the metal appendage to his wrist. She was not especially surprised to find Tink at the door, and ushered her in.

“Tink?” said Killian, who was of course less prepared for her appearance than Emma had been.

“Hook,” she acknowledged, perching herself on the windowsill. Ignoring Emma for the moment, she asked, “You’ll hold to the bargain?”

Killian, confused, recovered enough to risk a quick look at Emma, who returned an equally quick nod. “Of course I will,” he said.

Tink turned to Emma. “Then we have a deal,” she said. She pulled a folded paper from her pocket, handing it to the other woman. “Some names.” 

“Thanks, Tink,” said Emma fervently.

But Tink wasn’t done. “There’s also something else, if you wanted.” She was again affecting a casual tone, but Emma could tell whatever followed would be more important than Tink was prepared to let on. She fidgeted with the sleeve of her dress. As she pulled it up slightly, Emma saw a line of several red scars arrayed on her forearm. “There’s a lot of kids in the forest,” she continued. “With and without parents. Most of them don’t go to school. Too many records,” she explained. “I know Ashley’s worried about it, now that Alexandra is getting old enough. It would be good if there were someone to teach them, even just to read and write a little. Some of the adults could use it, too. Regina’s been around for a long time.”

“Are you -- ?” began Emma, before cutting off the tactless question.

Tink laughed, catching her meaning. “Oh, no,” she said bitterly. “I’m educated enough, for all the good it’s done me. But you asked me what people needed, and I’m telling you.”

“You’re telling me to start a school? Where would I even hold it?” Emma asked, choosing to focus on the purely practical side of the issue.

“I think Granny would let you do it here,” Killian interjected. “She plays tough, but she has a soft spot for children. And between you and me, though she tried with Ruby, I’m not sure the girl can do much more than read the names on the orders she delivers. You convince her to come, Granny will see her way to making some space.”

“I’ve never taught before,” said Emma, “But if I had some workbooks, and maybe even a teacher’s manual or something…”

“Why Emma Nolan,” said Killian. “Are you asking me to hold up a _primary school_? That’ll be a new low, even for me.”

Emma smiled. “I suppose I am.”

“Don’t worry,” said Tink. “You can confess to Friar Tuck, if you’re feeling guilty.” It could have been nasty, but Emma thought Tink was as caught up in the moment as she and Killian were.

“Well, then,” said Killian, clapping his hands. “Let’s start saving the world.”

And Emma could hear in his voice that if he wasn’t entirely serious, he wasn’t entirely joking, either.


	7. New Worlds

Emma took the opportunity of their remaining three days at Granny’s to do some recruitment. She started with Ashley, who gave an enthusiastic promise to pass the word on to other mothers of young children. While Ruby didn’t seem terribly interested in furthering her own education, when Emma repeated Killian’s suggestion that it would make Granny more likely to agree to let them use the inn, she gamely agreed to take one for the team. Wendy had gotten enough schooling herself at some point to have taught Michael and John the basics, but said she would speak to other forest orphans. Emma herself paid evening visits to some of the cottagers in the area; Killian escorted her, but adamantly refused to come in, observing that Captain Hook was hardly the most convincing advertisement for the merits of education. Though she would have appreciated the support, Emma had to concede his point.

One thing Emma hadn’t been prepared for was the idea that education _needed_ an advertisement. In Emma’s world, not learning to read was like not learning to breathe: it simply wasn’t an option. A few parents that Emma spoke to, however, offered no more than a distantly polite promise to think about sending their children, and one woman flatly told Emma that her son was far better off spending his days chopping wood and hunting than reciting his ABCs. Emma had weakly muttered some platitudes about expanding horizons, but she realized she’d have to think of something better by the time the first day arrived. Plenty of people, she guessed, would come to hear her out of simple curiosity, especially given her connection to Hook, but that would wear thin very quickly.

Recruiting older students was another challenge. Logically, Tink had to be right that some not insignificant number of the teens and early twenty-somethings living in the forest were functionally, if not entirely, illiterate. One of the earliest things Regina had done was repeal compulsory education laws, ostensibly to promote parental autonomy and validate alternatives to traditional academic attainment, but really to relieve herself of the burden of funding a functional school system – and, Emma suspected, of the risk of an inconveniently educated populace. Henry, grim as his childhood had been, had actually been _lucky_ to not only find a spot in an orphanage, but one in a district whose local leadership (thanks in no small part to Emma’s parents), had been committed to keeping their public schools open and accessible. Certainly, the people of Sherwood weren’t likely to have had similar opportunities.

Yet, Emma gathered in conversations with Killian and Tink, the fifteen years of Regina’s rule hadn’t been enough time to entirely erode stigmas over illiteracy, and going over to grown men and women and implying they might have a need for reading lessons was likely to be taken as an insult – especially by those who needed them most. Emma supposed she would simply have to trust to word of mouth to convey the pointed message that her classes would be open to students of _all_ ages. Surprisingly, it was Granny who finally suggested another strategy.

“Have class in the bar,” she said. “Even this place is pretty quiet first thing in the morning, and people can come and listen even if it they don’t want to admit they’re there for the lessons.”

“Thanks, Granny,” said Emma. “I really appreciate it. I hope it won’t cut into your business.”

Granny snorted. “I think business will be just fine,” she said. “What are they going to do, switch to the competition?”

*****

Given their new understanding, Emma had a feeling that Granny might have been willing to let Emma and Killian remain at the inn indefinitely, but the two of them decided not to push it. If Regina found out that the inn was sheltering them, the delicate balance that kept her from overt action against the forest dwellers might be shaken. Left unsaid was the knowledge that even holding classes there might put Granny’s in the firing line, if word got out to the wrong people, but it was a risk they were going to have to take.

So, a week after they had arrived, Emma and Killian set out for their new home. Killian hadn’t spent the last night at Granny’s in their room, instead going out on what he this time called a “supply run.” He had already scouted out a location, a cleared-out equipment shed on the grounds of a now abandoned mill.

Maybe it was only a reflection of her severely diminished expectations, but Emma was pleased by what she found inside. Calling it a “cottage” or “cabin” might have been slightly optimistic, but certainly, this place wasn’t a shack or hovel, either. This was, she realized, not so much because of any profound material advantages it had over the other dwelling, but because of the care Killian had taken in setting it up. Though the furniture still didn’t consist of much more than a blow-up mattress and a small table that Emma suspected had seen better days, this time, a blanket and tablecloth were covering them, immediately creating a homier atmosphere. The floor had been swept and scrubbed, and Killian had even covered the center of it with an area rug.

Best of all, however, were the books. Whether or not Killian had actually broken into an elementary school, he had managed to procure a number of early childhood readers, as well as some workbooks and a couple of more theoretical texts on literacy education and classroom management. Having decided to begin classes the following week, Emma had at least a little bit of time to study them and begin planning out lessons and strategies – although, she quickly realized, some of what she was reading was going to have to be heavily adapted for her particular circumstances. A chapter on teaching in underprivileged schools encouraged educators to remember that “Projectors and transparencies can still be an adequate substitute for state-of-the-art technology”; Emma was hoping for a small chalkboard and a reliable supply of paper. “The Diverse Classroom” didn’t quite cover what to do if your student body ranged from antsy preschoolers to prostitutes in their twenties. And Emma didn’t even bother with “Securing Funding from Your Community,” as she seriously doubted “ask the neighborhood bandit to remember to pick up pencils and notebooks” was an approved technique.  

Even so, Emma managed to isolate some useful information, especially on teaching literacy to older children and adults. Based on what she read, she decided that, assuming she had enough turn-out to warrant it, she would divide the students into two groups based on age rather than approximate reading level in order to avoid subjecting her older students to texts like “Happy the Frog Learns to Share” and allow her to establish a level of discourse that was mature, even when the skills being taught were basic. This would create some problems, as there might be children in the ten and under group who had mastered at least the fundamentals of reading, and many more in the older group who would be starting from square one. But on balance, Emma thought that it was better than the alternative; she could find ways of grouping students within classes and assigning them different tasks to suit their needs.

A week later, Emma was under no illusions that she was a qualified teacher. The students she was about to meet deserved better. But deserving, she had painfully learned, had little to do with it, and Emma was the only one who had volunteered.

*****

“You don’t have to stay,” said Emma to Killian as they entered Granny’s. He had been happy to talk her through her various deliberations in the previous week, along with scrounging up a rather impressive (if under the circumstances, somewhat alarming) number of supplies, but there was no reason he had to subject himself to four hours of the ABCs.

“I want to,” he answered. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve gotten rather invested in this little tale, Swan. I have to see how it turns out.”

Apparently, Tink had the same thought, as she, too, was waiting for Emma in the bar when they entered. Ostensibly, it was to offer her and Killian a couple new suggestions for what they had taken to referring to, tongue-in-cheek, as the ethical redistribution of the nation’s wealth, but she made no move to leave when they were done, and stayed for both classes.

In the end, Emma wound up with over fifty students, distributed roughly equally between the two classes, in addition to several more adults who she suspected had, as Granny had predicted, shown up to listen under the guise of ordering food. One mother had come to the class for younger children with her toddler, and when Emma suggested to her that the child was too young for school, her objections – combined with a few significant coughs from the listening Tink – left Emma with the impression that the two-year-old wasn’t actually the reason for the woman’s presence. Emma resolved the situation by telling her that the little boy could stay as long as she remained to “help” him.

The ten and under class, Emma thought, was the easier of the two, despite the predictable difficulties of wrangling rambunctious children. This was made slightly easier by the presence of Killian, who, at the first moment of difficulty, had loudly cleared his throat and displayed his hook prominently when the children turned to look.

 _Oh my God,_ thought Emma, _I’ve brought an enforcer to my first day of kindergarten_. She had to admit, however, that it was effective, even if it did result in her having to ignore a shouted “Miss Leia, is Captain Hook your _boyfriend_?” from one of the girls. In any case, Emma got through the two hours by having the children who could do so take turns reading from a storybook, after which she used the events of the story to segue into an introduction to the letters of the alphabet.

The second class was different. Emma noticed, in the first place, that a few of the students were much older than she had anticipated – whoever was at fault for their lack of education, it couldn’t be Regina. A number of the others, especially a group of boys between the ages of about eleven and fifteen, were obviously not happy to be here, having trooped in after Wendy Darling wearing various expressions of dissatisfaction. Though she was scarcely older than they were, Wendy, in addition to caring for her brothers, seemed to have become something of a de facto mother to some of the other orphans, which apparently included the clout to demand school attendance.

“Before we start,” began Emma, “I want to ask each of you to say something about why you’re here. And yes,” she added, anticipating the response, “‘Because Wendy forced me to’ is a perfectly valid answer.”

Most of the answers were indeed flippant. Wendy’s group weren’t the only ones among the younger students to claim to have been coerced into attendance by a parental figure, several more gave variations on “just because,” and one older teenager offered “Because you’re really hot” to general snickers. Killian made a movement at that, prepared to intervene, but Emma shot him a warning glare, and he subsided. She might have led a sheltered life, but this was hardly the first time she’d encountered a wiseass teenage boy.

A few students, however, gave more thoughtful responses. One girl of around twelve admitted that she had really liked school until she’d had to stop going when her parents were forced to flee to the forest to avoid arrest. A man who was probably a few years older than Emma said that he wanted to set an example for his own children, the older of whom Emma thought might have been one of the kids from the earlier class. Another teenage boy said that he’d always wanted to learn, but was needed to work at home and was hoping he could manage the two hours, three morning a week schedule that Emma had set up. A few more gave practical reasons for their attendance: a waitress noted that it would be easier to keep track of orders if she could write things down, and someone else was tired of needing to find someone else to help read and transcribe the letters he exchanged (via Ruby) with family outside the forest.

When they were done, Emma thanked them and said, “Now I’m going to tell you why I’m here.”

“There’s a lot of simple reasons that reading and writing makes life easier,” she began, “taking down orders, sending messages, finding out information yourself rather than hoping someone else will relay it to you. I also think reading stories and books can make life better, though that’s something you’ll have to judge for yourselves as we go along. But that’s not the main reason I’m here.”

She took a breath. “Some of you probably know, or can guess, that I’m new around here. Before I came, I had a very different kind of life. Sometimes, it feels like I’ve come from a totally different world, where nothing I used to know applies. The truth is, in this world, maybe whether you know how to read or not won’t matter that much. But worlds can change. Regina won’t be in power forever.”

A murmur went around the room. They might not know she was Emma Nolan, but technically, Miss Leia had just committed treason.

“One day, whether it comes tomorrow or ten years from now, you might find yourself in a world where other kinds of lives become possible. And in that world, there will still be waitresses and woodcutters and shoemakers who maybe can get by without an education if they’re not interested in getting one. And that’s fine. But maybe you’ll decide you want to do something else. Work in a hospital, or for a newspaper, or in a school. Run a business. Run for a seat on a town council. Whatever you decide, it should be your choice. Regina is good at taking those away, or making us think we don’t have any choices at all. I’m trying to help give them back. I can’t make any guarantees. Just promise to try to give you all your best chance.”

“Now,” she finished, “We can begin.”

*****

It wasn’t at all what she expected when she had set out for Sherwood Forest, but Emma found over the weeks that followed that she loved being a teacher. Progress was slower than she liked, especially for the older students; an adult who made painstaking effort to master the alphabet, she was keenly aware, was likely years away from anything approaching functional literacy. But it was a start, and most of the students seemed to have decided to stick with it. A couple of the people who had hovered at the back tables, unwilling to admit to being members of the class, had eventually joined the rest of the group, and she’d even picked up a couple of extras. Beyond the students, Killian and Tink were no longer the only people who sometimes sat in on parts of Emma’s lessons, whether out of idle curiosity or genuine interest she wasn’t entirely sure.

Killian still came to both classes every day, except when he was otherwise occupied with business of either the Captain Hook or the Robin Hood variety. He sat at some remove from the class, where he could watch and listen without drawing too much attention to himself. Some of the children, especially those with parents in the picture, still seemed inclined to give him a wide berth, but most of the younger ones, with the cheerful adaptability of children, appeared to regard him as a kind of fascinating class mascot. During a group activity, a few of the bolder ones even took the opportunity to run over and, before Emma could stop them, ask him how he had really lost his hand.

“A crocodile ate it,” said Killian, without missing a beat, leaving them to a discussion of whether it would be worse to have your hand eaten by a crocodile or by a bear.

But one day, about six weeks in, Killian became involved in the class in a rather more substantial way. After exhausting a lot of the better materials in the class reader she had been using, Emma had decided to ask the students to try to write a story as a class, using their own favorite stories as a model. She had been referring to the tales they had read together as a group, but as they discussed their choices, a boy piped up with “Do you know the one about the time Robin Hood pulled down the Sheriff of Nottingham’s pants?”

“No,” said Emma, trying to keep her amusement in check as she glanced toward Killian, “I _don’t_ know that story. Do you think you can tell me, Tootles?”

After Tootles told his story, others clamored to add in their own tales of Robin Hood, from ones that she suspected, from her knowledge of Killian, might possess a grain of truth, to outright absurdities (she hoped, but could not be sure, that Tootles’s had been of the latter variety). In the end, Emma simply couldn’t resist.

“You know,” she said, “Captain Hook has actually _met_ Robin Hood. Maybe he could tell us a story.”

Everyone turned to Killian, who stared back at Emma, slightly aghast. “Did you and Robin Hood ever have a fight?” asked Ashley’s daughter Alexandra, her eyes wide.

“Never,” said Killian, apparently deciding to play along. “But if I did, I’m pretty sure I would win. Robin Hood’s actually a right w-- ” Emma coughed loudly, cutting him off, and Killian dutifully changed course. “Right. Did you ever hear about the time that Robin tricked the Queen into knighting the blacksmith’s son? I had just robbed Regina’s mansion at the time, so I saw the whole thing…”

After that, Emma held out the promise of another Robin Hood story from Hook as a reward for reaching various milestones during class. Killian was a natural storyteller, and surprisingly good at adapting tales for an audience of young children, making sure to inject plenty of understated messages about loyalty, integrity, and protecting the weak amidst the swashbuckling and derring-do. Though they didn’t discuss it directly, Emma had heard enough of Killian’s past by now – mostly, but not entirely on that first night – to know that these stories had very little relationship to the man Killian had been. But they did, she believed, say something about the man he wished he had been.

And maybe, she added to herself - thinking of the Darlings, of sleepless nights spent tracking down teaching supplies, of every person on Tink’s lists, of how he had saved Emma herself, and given up all thought of gain to help her find her mission – the man he had become.

*****

Tink, too, had kept up her attendance, although generally only at the class for older students, where she had made herself genuinely helpful as a kind of informal teaching assistant, sometimes offering guidance to more advanced students while Emma was busy with the beginners. Emma could tell she was still using, but she thought it was less than she had been.

Today, unfortunately, was not one of her good days; Tink had come to class as usual, but she had shown up with that glazed look that Emma had come to associate with her binges. As Emma was already slightly nervous about the content of today’s class, Tink’s latest descent under the wagon was especially poorly timed.

After the first day, Emma had made a conscious decision to keep politics out of her class, at least on an overt level. As with her selections for the younger students, she gravitated towards stories that lent themselves to some discussion of larger ethical concerns, but she wasn’t here to be a preacher – or, despite her earliest intentions, a revolutionary. Recently, however, she had come across a story that had been too applicable to their present situation to avoid sharing.

The story was about a group of people who found out that their otherwise ideal society was based on a great injustice to a much smaller group. Some of them decided to stay, noting that leaving wouldn’t do anyone any good, and would mean abandoning all the progress they had made in medicine and technology and art. Some of them decided to leave, declaring that they couldn’t profit for another second from the suffering of others.

Emma asked the students advanced enough to do so to write a response explaining who they thought the hero of the story was, and why.

They discussed it first and, as Emma had expected, the immediate and most popular response was that the people who left were the heroes. They had, after all, refused to tolerate a corrupt world, at great cost to themselves.

After some prompting, however, another position emerged: if the society in the story really _was_ so great for most people, maybe it was worth leaving a few people out. The most vocal proponent of this position was an older teen named Jack, who Emma thought lived with a widowed mother somewhere on the outskirts of the forest.

“I mean, it sucks if you’re at the bottom,” he said, “But a society where only a few people suffer sounds pretty good to me.”

Tink suddenly made a rather rude, noise of dissent. “The problem with the people who leave isn’t that they should have stayed and _taken it_ , it’s that they should have stayed and _fought,_ ” she said, much too loudly.

“Oh yeah?” retorted Jack, “and how do you think that would have gone for them?”

“It doesn’t matter!” said Tink. “So maybe they would have lost. Maybe they would have died. Maybe they would have ruined things for everyone.” She was almost shouting now. “At least it’d be better than running off and hiding in a godforsaken _forest_!”

The room had grown almost painfully silent. There had been no mention of a forest in the story.

“You’ll forgive me,” said Jack coldly and distinctly, “If I'm not about to take moral advice from a cracked out whore.”

Tink blanched, and Emma thought that she might actually be about to cry.

Before Emma had formulated her own response, Killian sprang into action, running up and slamming Jack against the wall, his hook to his throat.

“Apologize to Tink,” he growled. “Or my arm just might slip.”

“Hook, let him down!” shouted Emma. She couldn’t disagree with the impulse, but also couldn’t allow it to stand.

Killian listened, but only barely, releasing his hold on Jack without giving him room to escape. “Tink,” he went on, “Makes an honest living, which is more than I can say for myself and more, if I understand it, than can be said for you, Jack Spriggins.”

Killian turned to face Tink, who hadn’t left the room, seemingly frozen under the same spell that held everyone else there. “There are far more dishonorable things a person can do for a few coins than give someone else pleasure.”

He walked to the door. When he’d almost reached it, he turned back. “And by the way, you’re all wrong,” he said, and this time, he was looking at Emma. “There are no heroes in that story. Just people trying their bloody hardest to do their best in an awful world.”

*****

The class, by tacit agreement, had ended at that point. Emma immediately went to Tink, but she didn’t want to talk, muttering “say thanks to Hook” before heading off to her own room. Emma asked Ruby to keep an eye on her that night; she had already been coming down from a high, and Emma was worried what she might do to herself.

Killian had, apparently left the inn entirely, and eventually, Emma made her own way back to their cabin. By the time she arrived, she had reached a decision.

He came back hours later. Offering no explanation for his absence, he simply said “I’m sorry, Swan.”

“For what?” she said calmly. “Ok, yeah, I’d prefer if you hadn’t threatened to kill one of my students, and a ringing defense of prostitution probably wouldn’t make most people’s ‘inspiring moments in teaching’ reel, but Tink appreciated what you did for her. And so did I.”

He looked down. “I’d been trying to be different,” he said. “Even when I…work, I’d been trying to be better.”

He started, as usual, to remove his hook. But this time, Emma laid her hand on his arm to stop him.

“Don’t do that,” she said, and he looked at her quizzically. “Your hook,” she clarified. “I mean, if you really want to take it off, you can, but I think I know why you do it, and you don’t have to.” She moved both of her hands down his arms, taking hook and hand in hers.

“Killian, you aren’t Captain Hook. You aren’t Robin Hood. You’re both. And you’re more. That’s the kind of man you are. Be ashamed of things you’ve done, if you have to, but not of that.”

She took a breath, and for the second time in three months, brought the world as she knew it crashing down around her.

“Because that’s the man I fell in love with.”

She looked up at him, and in an instant,  he had met her lips with his own. When they broke apart, he said urgently, “Emma, are you sure? I need to know that you’re sure…”

“Yes,” she breathed, and they sank down together to the mattress.

*****

She woke up still in his arms the next morning. He was awake, and kissed her as soon as their eyes met. But then he drew away, falling back onto the pillow, his face turned to the ceiling.

“Even if you’re right,” he said, without preamble, “It doesn’t change anything. You’re working for a better world, and I want that for you. For them. But there’s no place for me there. Not after the things I’ve done.”

“Then we’ll find a different world. Together,” she said, sliding her body back under the crook of his arm. “Even if we have to build it ourselves.”

*****

A few nights later, Emma was, for the first time since, alone in bed. Killian had had to go out – not, fortunately, to replenish supplies, but to dispense them, this time to a widowed baker with an infant son who was struggling after his wife’s death. He hadn’t, Emma knew, gone far, and she was listening for his return when she instead heard a whistle. It was instantly familiar to her, though she’d heard it only once before.

Pulling on a pair of sweatpants, she opened the door to a frantic John Darling.

“Leia,” he cried. “Where’s Hook?”

“He’s out,” she answered. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the Queen’s men,” he said breathlessly. “They’re coming for Ruby.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story that Emma is teaching is based on Ursula LeGuin's wonderful "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas."
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left kudos and comments!


	8. Fighting Words

“Does Ruby know?” was Emma’s first question. If Ruby had already made a run for it, and it was simply a matter of keeping her hidden, maybe they could get out of this without disaster.

Apparently, they weren’t going to be that lucky. “No,” John explained. “I’m not coming from Granny’s. I was out. On a _mission,_ ” he clarified, even the apparent emergency not quite enough to dampen his pride in the task. Emma still didn’t have a detailed picture of how exactly the forest’s network of spies and informants worked, but she knew that Killian had deputized John as a kind of courier.

Emma tried again. “How much time do we have?”

“Not a lot, I think.”

Her immediate thought was to send him straight to Granny’s and hope like hell that he got there first. But if he didn’t…

She couldn’t risk it. Especially as she had a sinking feeling that the timing wasn’t a coincidence. Ruby was a small-time smuggler, and had been for years. And she was getting arrested _now_ , scarcely two months after Emma had arrived on the scene?

 If Regina _knew_ that Emma was here, she wouldn’t need to resort to subterfuge. If, however, she suspected – well, she wouldn’t be Regina if she settled for a simple investigation when a more vindictive alternative was available to her. And Emma couldn’t let Ruby get caught up in the crossfire.

“Do you know the baker’s house?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where Hook went. He’s probably on his way back – see if you can find him. When you do, tell him what happened, and that I’ve gone to Granny’s.”

“ _You’re_ going?” said John, incredulously. “Do you even know how to fight?”

“No,” said Emma. “So you’d better be fast.”

Taking her words to heart, John didn’t even respond before dashing off.

So, scrawling a note to Killian in case he and John missed each other in the woods, Emma put on a pair of sneakers, grabbed her university fencing saber, and set off to face the Queen’s men.

*****

Even before she arrived at Granny’s, Emma could see that she wasn’t going to beat out Regina’s forces. As she neared the inn, she began encountering panicked figures taking off in the other direction, apparently not prepared to wait to see who the soldiers were looking for, or whether or not they would content themselves with whoever’s name appeared on the warrant. Emma recognized a number of them, including a half-dressed Friar Tuck, who seemed to have been surprised in a position that anyone capable of actual shame might have considered compromising. In other circumstances, Emma would have found it funny, but she knew that with the retreating patrons of Granny's went any hope there had been that she was going to be able to avoid using the only card she could think of to play.

The chaos outside the inn was nothing to what awaited her inside it. No one noticed Emma right away as she entered the area that she now thought of mainly as her classroom. Ruby was huddled behind the bar, four guards, their weapons raised, standing across from her, their backs to Emma. In between them, to Emma’s s surprise was a group of more than a dozen of Granny’s regulars, including a couple of Emma’s older students and what she thought were all eight members of Leroy’s construction crew. Leroy himself was holding a large saw in front of him like a weapon.

“I say again, surrender in the Queen’s name, if all of you don’t want to be taken with her,” said one of the soldiers. “Don’t force me to do something drastic.”

_Too late for that,_ thought Emma. “I have a better idea,” she said. They turned at once to see who had spoken; after weeks as a teacher, Emma had learned how to make her voice heard in a crowd. “Leave Ruby alone, and focus on someone Regina _actually_ cares about.”

She looked him in the eye, hoping that her terror wasn’t showing. “I’m Emma Nolan,” she announced. “I think the Queen wanted to see me?”

 “Yeah, and I’m Mary Margaret,” he scoffed. “Look, kid, I don’t know what game you’re playing but -”

“A haircut and some dye,” interrupted Emma. “It so happens I know a pretty good smuggler.”

He looked closely at her, squinting slightly in the dim light. A few muttered remarks passed among the soldiers, and the one who seemed to be in charge finally asked, “Are you offering yourself as a trade?”

_Yes,_ thought Emma, _if it comes to it._  What she said, however, was “I’m thinking I won’t have to. Regina wants me alive.” She raised the saber slightly higher, a signal that she wasn’t going to make it easy for them to take her. And, she realized a moment later, the others weren’t going to make it easy, either. Half of the group gathered around Ruby had now moved to flank Emma.

“Her Majesty has been known to be…forgiving of twitchy trigger fingers,” warned the soldier.

“For people she doesn’t have any plans for, sure,” said Emma, thinking of Henry with a pang. “But my family is pretty important to her. So I guess the question comes down to how much faith you have in Regina’s famous powers of forgiveness.”

The four men stood for a few moments, irresolute. Emma had clearly made her point. One of the soldiers who hadn’t spoken yet broke the silence with “You can’t expect to hold us off forever.”

“No,” said another, very familiar voice. “Just until the cavalry arrives.”

Killian strode down the steps leading to the guest rooms. Emma, almost overwhelmed with relief, didn’t even stop to wonder how long he had been listening, or where he had come from. He was pointing his gun at the men, and Emma wasn’t sure if she should be horrified or grateful that he almost certainly hadn’t had the chance to reload it.

Two of the soldiers let out audible, rather undignified yelps. The other two seemed unsure of whether to point their own weapons at Hook or keep them trained on Emma. Plucking up his courage, one of them finally decided on the former and said “You’re outnumbered four to one, Hook.”

Killian smirked. While he kept his gun cocked, he was leaning almost casually against the wall, as if to register his utter unconcern for the whole situation. “Yeah, but when that one is me, I’d say it evens the odds a fair bit. Besides,” he said, nodding his head in a gesture meant to encompass Emma, Leroy, and even Granny, who had at some point during the scene produced a large steak knife from one of the drawers, “I’m afraid your count is a bit off.”

“Now here’s what’s going to happen,” he continued. “The four of you are going to run back to your lord and mistress, and tell her _exactly_ what happened here today. And you’re going to deliver this message: this forest is under _my_ protection, now, and she has to consider whether she’s quite sure enough that going after Emma Nolan isn’t going to lead to more trouble for her than it's worth before she decides to come after her again.”

Two of the soldiers made a movement as if to lower their guns, but the one who Emma had been thinking of as the leader barked, “Hold your positions!.” Then, to Killian, “We don’t negotiate with jumped-up street thugs.”

“I was really hoping you were going to say that, mate,” replied Killian, and in a moment, Emma learned why he had kept his stance against the wall. With a slash of his hook, he made a final cut to the rope attached to the large chandelier in the center of the room, sending it crashing down onto the four men below.

Two of them were knocked out with the first blow. The other two had reacted quickly enough to avoid a direct hit, but Killian and Leroy took advantage of the confusion to leave them in the same condition as their fellows with a couple of well-placed applications of their respective weapons and fists.

When he was sure they were neutralized, Killian ran to Emma, who had retreated nearer to where Granny and Ruby were standing by the bar. “Are you alright?” he demanded, and kissed her deeply when she nodded.

_So much for keeping things discreet,_ thought Emma, as Ruby gave a somewhat shaky wolf-whistle behind them. Not that she had intended to hide their relationship, but she hadn’t been planning on quite such a public announcement, either. She found, however, that she didn’t much care.

After they broke apart, Killian dropped to the ground, disarming the four unconscious soldiers and laying the guns aside on a nearby table. He then began giving instructions with an air of authority that reminded Emma that he had been in the military before he had been a lone bandit in the woods. “Tie them up and drop them on the edge of the forest,” he said to Leroy. “Make sure it's somewhere where they’re likely to be seen before they wake on their own. We want her embarrassed.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Leroy as his men split into twos, each pair holding a soldier between them. “And we’ll make sure they don’t wake too soon after we leave them.”

“Good man,” said Killian. Once they trooped out, he turned to Granny. “Sorry about the mess, Granny,” he said. “There’s also a window broken upstairs. And” – he scratched behind his ear -- “I might have scraped up the back of the inn while climbing up the wall.”

“It’s OK, Hook, I figure you’re good for the money,” she answered with what Emma thought was astonishing magnanimity under the circumstances. Possibly, she considered, Granny hadn’t come to the same conclusion that Emma had, and thought it really was by chance that Regina’s men had come for Ruby. The possibility left Emma feeling vaguely guilty, but she didn’t say anything to correct her impression, even when Ruby chimed in by thanking Emma for her bravery.

“Guess the disguise was kind of a waste, though, huh?” said Ruby, indicating Emma’s hair.

“It’s grown on me,” said Emma wryly. “Do you think it’s safe for us to leave them?” she asked Killian.

“I think we all left ‘safe’ behind around the time you charged in here with a sword,” he said, but his tone was admiring rather than accusing. He turned back to Granny. “For the foreseeable future, we should post a guard – two, if we can – around the inn at all times. Ask anyone you trust who knows how to use a gun. I somehow suspect you’ll find that more than a few people around here do. In the meantime, I’ll increase the number of patrols I send out so that we’ll be more likely to be forewarned about what’s coming.”

He picked up one of the guns. “I can take first watch.”

Granny looked between Emma and Killian, and seemed to come to a decision. “No, you two go home,” she said. “I can take the watch,” and picked up a gun of her own from the table.

Emma looked at her in shock. Ruby, she noticed, seemed utterly unsurprised.

“What,” said Granny, “You think I was born an innkeeper?”

*****

Back at the cabin, after Emma and Killian had vigorously celebrated their mutual survival, Emma reluctantly brought them back to reality.

“She’s not going to leave us alone, is she?”

Killian hesitated, but couldn’t deny it. “No,” he conceded quietly. “Although we might have bought ourselves some time. You _are_ too valuable to risk lightly, and she knows now that she’s going to have a fight on her hands if she tries to move against you. But eventually, yes, she’s going to find a way to come after us.”

After a pause, he said “I know you don’t like it, but it might be worth getting some more guns through the black market.”

Emma sighed. “My parents compromised with Regina to avoid another war,” she said. “They didn’t think it was worth the price.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t have been,” said Killian. “But this time, I’m not so sure we’re going to get another choice.”

_Regina is good at taking away choices,_ thought Emma, her mind echoing her own words from the first day of class back to her. _I’m trying to help give them back_.  

But Emma _had_ made a choice, she reminded herself. She had chosen to come here, without any idea of what it really meant. And Emma was prepared to live with that decision.

The events of the day had reminded her, however, that whatever price there was to be paid, there was no guarantee that Emma would be the one who wound up paying it.


	9. The Price

Fortunately, Emma had not been scheduled to teach the morning after the Queen’s men had come for Ruby, and by the time her next class day arrived, the barroom was in reasonable enough condition to resume. It was also, however, packed; time enough for cleaning also meant time enough for word of what had happened to have spread. Most of the extras, Emma thought, were simply curious, but a number of the parents had also accompanied their children, possibly seeking reassurance about what these new developments meant for their safety. Unfortunately, Emma couldn’t provide any – or, at least, not to the adults; for the children, she tried her best.

The first question, to her relief, was easy. “Should we call you Miss Emma now?” someone called out.

“If you want to,” she answered. “But you can still call me Miss Leia if you like.”

“Why did you lie?” demanded another voice. This was more difficult; most of these children, despite growing up around various outlaws and renegades, were too young to really grasp moral nuance. Lying was bad.

“Sometimes we have to lie to protect people,” said Emma. “Or to be safe.” She explained, as simply as she could, that she had written some things that the Queen didn’t like, and had come to the forest to hide from her. Enough of them _did_ have reason to understand hiding from Regina that she thought they mostly accepted it.

Then it came. “Are they going to come back?”

Despite the ready-made justification for dishonesty she had just offered, Emma decided to go with as gentle a version of the truth as she could manage. “I don’t know,” she said. “We hope not, but if they do, the grown-ups here are going to work hard to make sure that you’re safe. That _all_ of us are.”

After that, the discussion devolved into excited questions about what had happened – most of the children seemed to be under the impression that Emma had actually fought off half an army with a sword – and Emma could only get them to settle down into the lesson with the promise that Hook would tell the story at the end of class if they were good. She could, it occurred to her, have told this one just as well herself, especially as she was slightly nervous about what embellishments Killian might see fit to include. But she found she wasn’t much in the mood for storytelling, and choose to leave him to it.

With the older students, she was more direct. “You all know what happened,” she said before anyone had the chance to question her. “I know I’m not the only one here she might have reason to want, but because of who my parents are, I might be a reason for her to come back. I understand if any of you don’t want to take the risk, and decide to steer clear of this place for a while. But if you want to help, any of the adults who know how to handle a weapon should talk to Hook or Granny about guard duty, and anyone who can still safely take trips outside the forest should keep their ears open for news.”

And for a time after that, things went on as they had before. A few students did indeed stop coming to class, but only a few. Granny’s remained on a state of high alert. Killian and Emma kept discreetly dispensing his ill-gotten gains. Tink, to Emma’s great disappointment, seemed to have mostly sunk back into the state of hazy, cynical torpor she had found her in. She still maintained enough of a bead on forest life to occasionally provide them with the name of a woodcutter who had broken a leg or a particularly lost new arrival to Sherwood, but always briefly and brusquely. She hadn’t come to help during class since the day Jack Spriggins had insulted her.

“You can’t save everyone, Swan,” said Killian when they discussed it. But Emma noticed with interest that Tink had refused to accept money for her information since the raid on Granny’s, and thought that it was more complicated than that.

Then, of course, there was Killian himself. Emma knew that, when he said that she couldn’t save everyone, what he meant was that she couldn’t save everyone like he believed she had saved him. Emma didn’t think, however, that it had been a matter of saving. She had reminded him of the best of himself, and in return, he had dedicated that best to her with all his heart and strength and courage. Emma had dated before, had slept with a few other men, had once even believed herself in love. She could see, now, how shallow it had been. Part of it was how shallow Emma herself had been, comparatively speaking, the pampered heiress content not to question too closely the premises on which her life had been built. But part of it, too, was that that there had been something so conditional about what those men, almost boys, really, had been offering: they wanted Emma, or loved her, because of the walls she had put up, and didn’t care to see beyond them. Were frightened to catch a glimpse. Even Henry, who had been a brother, and not a lover to her, had in the end wanted to see only a part of herself: he needed her to be the bold rebel who would, with his guidance, lead them all to some promised land.

Killian might sometimes believe Emma was a savior, but she knew past all doubt that his love for her didn’t depend on it. He loved her strength, and her weakness, her idealism and the knowledge that had dimmed it, the woman who had taken on four armed soldiers with hope and a sword, and the woman who wondered if that wasn’t, in the end, the most selfish and destructive thing she could have done. He would love her if she decided to make for the border tomorrow, if she made terms with Regina, if she told him to leave her and never come back. But she never would, and only hoped they’d have time enough for her to convince him of it.

Time. Three weeks passed, and four, and five, and Emma taught, and lived, and loved, and almost stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop. Until the night when she woke to a smell she couldn’t at first put a name to, a sweet, painfully sweet smell that brought her back to winter nights and summer picnics, her father’s arms around her and the taste of marshmallow in her mouth.

She remembered where she was, and the taste turned instantly to ash. “Killian!” She shook him awake. “Killian, there’s something burning!”

They ran out of the cabin, saw where the night sky had grown unnaturally bright, and knew.

Granny’s was on fire.

*****

By the time they arrived, it was too late for them to do any good. A few people were still casting buckets over the dying embers to keep the fire from spreading to the forest, but the inn itself had been burnt almost to its foundations. They would hear, later, the story of the way the forest had rallied to save it, and the people within. Remembering everyone she had seen running away from the chaos at Granny’s only weeks earlier, Emma could hardly believe how many, it seemed, had run toward the flames. Leroy had torn through the upper stories with an axe, breaking down doors in time for the residents to escape. Others had jumped from windows to crowds waiting to catch them below.

Later, she would hear all of that, and consider what it meant. But at the moment, there was only one thing that mattered: the three bodies lying inert on the ground before her.

The first was one of Leroy’s crew, a man she thought had been called Steven. Gruff, bitter Leroy was weeping openly beside him.

The second she recognized as Rufio, a boy in his late teens from Emma’s class. He had just learned to read well enough to make it through a children’s book on his own.

The third was Granny, her body lying near the ruined doorway of the inn she had refused to leave until everyone else had gotten to safety.

******

Somehow, incredibly, people still seemed to look instinctively toward Emma and Killian for instructions. He rose to the challenge that Emma would have been too ashamed to meet, even if she could have.

“Everyone who still has a home, and would be willing to take in others, stand to the left of me. Those who need a home, to the right. The first thing to do is make sure everyone has a roof over their heads tonight.”

The numbers were unbalanced, but not hopelessly so, although only if they extended the definition of reasonable living space to include a sleeping bag on the floor. And they would have to come up with the sleeping bags later. Yet Killian was convinced, after some calculating, that if he could get a few cottagers who weren’t present to volunteer, and moved people into some of his own various hideaways, they’d be able to make it work. Once everyone had someplace to go, Killian turned to Ruby.

“Where do you want to bury her?” he asked with a dreadful finality.

“Right here,” said Ruby, who had made no move to join the homeless being paired with hosts, instead staying alongside her grandmother, holding Granny’s limp hand in her own.

“Alright. Everyone who wants to pay their respects should return at noon, with a shovel if you have one.”

The crowd began to disperse. Killian had told John to lead his siblings, Ashley, and Alexandra to their own cabin. She suspected he didn’t intend for the two of them to return; they – Emma – would put anyone who lived with them in too much danger. They would find someplace else to go tomorrow night.

For the rest of this one, they sat with Ruby, keeping silent vigil until long after day had broken and the mourners had begun arriving for the funeral.

*****

It was a brief and quiet affair. Ruby was too emotional to speak except to thank Granny and apologize for not being a better granddaughter to her. Emma had seen enough of Granny and Ruby together to know that whatever faults could be laid at Ruby’s door, they had been long forgiven. A few others offered their own memories of her, mostly slight, comic anecdotes that even Emma, who had known her for only a short time, could recognize didn’t really capture her entirely. But they were heartfelt, and perhaps as true to who she had been as many other stories would have been. When the speeches were done, each person, starting with Ruby, took turns with the shovel, piling dirt on the grave until her body was covered. It had been wrapped in the sheet from Emma and Killian’s mattress, which Ashley had brought with her. No stone marked the grave, but anyone who had known the inn would not soon forget the spot, just paces away from where the misspelled sign had hung at its entrance.

Almost as soon as the last shovelful of dirt had been piled on the grave, Tink turned furiously on Emma. She had been among the assorted survivors last night, but as far as Emma knew, had not put herself among those seeking shelter. For all she knew, the other woman had spent the whole night wandering through the woods.

“How can you even show your face here?” she screamed. “You did this! You killed her! We were fine, until you came! The little princess on her adventure! We never needed you!”

Several people moved to restrain her; it looked like she might very well attack Emma bodily. Killian had begun some defense of her that Emma wasn’t paying attention to, but Emma said,

“You’re right.” It was almost the first words she had spoken since last night. “I brought this on you,” she said. “I did. If I could take it back, I never would have come. But I can’t. All I can do is try to fix what I can.”

The whole crowd had gone silent.

“I can’t give myself up,” she said. “Though if anyone wanted to sell me out, I frankly wouldn’t blame them. I believe that Regina wants to capture me to put pressure on my parents. Whatever she wants, I can’t let her get it. She’s got power over more people than the ones who live in Sherwood Forest.

“From now on, I’m going to stay out of your way as much as I can. Hopefully, that will keep Regina from coming after you again. For what it’s worth, even now, I don’t think she’s willing to go to the lengths of open slaughter. There’s a reason she chose fire, and at a certain point, if she goes too far, even most of her supporters aren’t going to let her maintain deniability. But in the meantime, people need homes. Ruby, do you have any interest in reopening Granny’s?”

“It’s almost burned to the ground,” she said weakly.

“But if we could do it?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s a good thing we have a construction crew.”

She looked toward Leroy, who nodded. But one of the others seemed doubtful. “The kinds of materials we’d need, it’s gonna cost a ton of money. More even than he can steal,” he added, gesturing toward Killian.

“Killian,” said Emma. Her use of his name hadn’t been a mistake this time, and he didn’t bother trying to stop her. “Do you have any contacts legitimate enough to have a bank account that we could access?”

“One,” he replied, “But I doubt he’d be willing to donate.”

“He wouldn’t have to. Just act as a go-between.”

“Then yes, though he’ll want a heavy commission. But who -?”

“As someone just reminded me,” Emma said grimly, “I’m just a rich girl on an adventure.”

She knelt down by Tink. When it had become apparent she was no longer an imminent risk to assault Emma, the people restraining her had released their hold, and she had fallen to the ground, crying quietly. Emma lifted the other woman’s chin with her hand, meeting her eyes as much as Tink would allow.

“The Queen’s not actually after you for anything, is she?”

Tink shook her head. It had only been a hunch, but, apparently, a good one. Not every life in the forest had been ruined by Regina. “Then you’re going to get a message to my parents. They’ve kept an offshore account, just in case things got really desperate. Tell them what’s happened. Killian will get you a note with the name of the banker as soon as we can.” She glanced at him to confirm that this was possible; he had, after all, been planning to send her parents a ransom note all those months ago. When he had, she finished, “And after that, you’re going to stay with them, and you’re damn well going to let them figure out a way to help you, because I need someone to make it out of this forest.”

“Please, Tink,” she said, when a moment had passed without an answer.

“I could run right to Regina,” she said. “Ruin you and your parents.”

“But you won’t,” said Emma. If there had been any doubt in her voice, she didn’t think Tink would have agreed to it, but Emma believed it with all her heart.

“I’ll do it,” said Tink, rising to her feet.

“I’ll come with you to the forest’s edge,” said Ashley, after Emma and Killian had given Tink the requisite instructions for finding her parents.

When they left, a small line of people were following behind, an oddly assorted honor guard accompanying Tink as she left Sherwood Forest for the last time.

*****

There was no pretense that the dank little structure that Killian brought Emma to that night was anything other than a hovel. This, she realized, must be the kind of place he had been staying in on those days where he hadn’t been able to make it home before daybreak. With forest real estate now at a premium, it would be their home for the foreseeable future.

“You were brilliant today, Swan,” said Killian. He had laid out a long coat of his to serve as bedding. “And for all that’s happened, you have to see that things have been changing since you’ve gotten here. All the people who helped at the fire, who offered their homes, Tink – I won’t say it’s all down to you, but before now, people might have called this place many things, but never a community.”

“It wasn’t worth it,” she said flatly.

He didn’t try to talk her out of it. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t suppose it was.”

The room was so small that it was hard for her to get any closer to him than they were already, standing only paces apart, so she leaned into him, her head against his chest.

“The first week we met,” she said, raising her face, “I asked you if you wanted to help me take down the Queen. You said you would. Is it still true?” 

“Swan,” he started warningly, but she held his gaze, and she could almost see in his face the moment he decided to silence all doubts. “Yes,” he said. “Always.”

“Then we can start now, because I have a plan,” she announced.

“We’re going to free Anna of Arendelle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, everyone! I didn't set out to kill Granny when I started planning out this fic, but as I wrote it became increasingly clear to me that there had to be real consequences to antagonizing Regina.


	10. Plans

“Prime Minister Elsa’s batty sister?” asked Killian.

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Emma couldn’t help but be pleased at the evidence that her position as Mary Margaret and David Nolan’s daughter had left her knowing _something_ that Captain Hook didn’t.

“She’s not crazy,” said Emma. “Or,” she qualified, “At least, she’s not actually in a mental hospital.” Emma had met Anna once at a political function at some point before relations between their two countries had begun to deteriorate, and the other woman _was_ rather eccentric. But, as she had just said, that wasn’t the reason she had abruptly disappeared from public life two years earlier.

Elsa had been elected Prime Minister of Arendelle seven years earlier on a platform of reform and social responsibility. It was time, she said, for Arendelle, which had traditionally been a minor player in world affairs, to take its place on the international stage, to use the financial and military power it had long enjoyed for good. At first, Elsa had mostly contented herself with humanitarian interventions abroad while focusing her legislative platform on domestic issues. But as she had gained in popularity and confidence, she had turned her attention south to Regina. While Arendelle had for years had an informal policy of looking the other way when refugees from the Queen’s tyranny sought safety on its shores, its leaders had been wary of doing anything overt enough to draw Regina’s ire, preferring to maintain at least chilly diplomatic ties with her.

Elsa, however, had tired of this compromise. She persuaded her Parliament to pass sanctions against Regina’s government and withdrew their ambassadors. Winning reelection on the heels of even more openly aggressive anti-Regina rhetoric emboldened her to go further, and there had been serious talks of spearheading an international coalition to pressure the tyrant to accept reforms – and, more ominously, of pursuing a “military option” if gentler modes of persuasion failed.

And then, two year ago, Elsa’s tune had changed rather suddenly. War would be too costly, both in lives and in money, which could be better spent on projects that might save more people than removing a single despot who liked to keep up at least a veneer of respectability. Restoring diplomatic ties between the two nations would give Arendelle the opportunity to exert a subtler influence on Regina, giving her the chance to “take a responsible place among the community of nations.”

Around the same time, Elsa’s younger sister Anna vanished from public view. She had been a frequent, sometimes vexing subject of press attention during her sister’s administration, known for a thoroughly _im_ politic habit of speaking her mind to all and sundry even (or especially) when she disagreed with her beloved sister. Elsa, much to her advisors’ frustration, had made no real effort to rein Anna in; while the media occasionally passed on rumors of exasperated arguments between the two, Anna continued living at the Prime Minister’s residence and remained a fixture at public events. Everyone knew that the two women had been inseparable since their parents’ deaths in an accident when the girls were teenagers.

Which is why, when Anna stopped showing up by Elsa’s side, people took notice. Finally, the Prime Minister had released a terse statement revealing that Anna had, unfortunately, been struggling for some time with mental illness, and had decided to seek long-term treatment in an undisclosed facility. The public, of course, was asked to respect the family’s privacy during this difficult time.

Pundits speculated about the effect of Anna’s illness on Elsa’s politics. Many people traced the Prime Minster’s moderate turn to the loss of Anna’s decidedly unmoderated counsel – and, perhaps, to depression over her sister’s condition. Whatever Elsa had initially said about exerting influence by subtler means, in the wake of Anna’s hospitalization, she had rather seemed to retreat into almost total isolationism, continuing to advance reforms within Arendelle, but confining her international activities to the most anodyne forms of diplomatic cooperation. 

Only a few people knew better. Anna wasn’t in an institution. She was being held hostage by Regina, with the promise that any movements Elsa made against the Queen would mean death for her sister. It was part of the reason that Emma had been so quick to pick up on Regina’s similar plans for Emma herself.

“So if Elsa was half ready for war with Regina _before_ this,” mused Killian when Emma had finished her explanation, “She’s going to be out for blood now. So long as she knows Anna is safe, first.”

“I’d think so. Plus, she’d owe us.”

Killian looked troubled. Hesitantly, he said, “Depending on how we do this, we wouldn’t have to rely on gratitude.”

“What do you mean?”

“She gets her sister back, angry as she is she might decide to leave well enough alone.” His eyes grew distant for a moment, and Emma suspected he was thinking of Liam. If he had somehow gotten another chance with his brother, had been able to start over somewhere else, in safety, he might not have been so hell-bent on revenge either. “But if _we_ held on to Anna…”

“No,” said Emma at once. “If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but we’re not doing that.”

“Do you want to keep your hands clean, or do you want to win?” said Killian, obviously frustrated. Then, in a gentler voice, “We’re talking about the lives of everyone in this country. Conscience may be a luxury we can’t afford.”

“I know,” said Emma. “And if I really thought that it was the only way – well, maybe I would.” She had already, she thought uneasily, compromised her morals in the past several months. Killian wasn’t only stealing from Regina and her cronies, as Emma well knew. “But I’ve met Anna, and Elsa. I think even if Elsa didn’t go for it, Anna would convince her. And I think that there’s a chance of things going wrong either way, and I can live with myself a lot better if I haven’t sunk to Regina’s level first.”

Emma wasn’t lying; holding Anna hostage themselves could very well backfire in any number of ways. She recognized, however, that it wasn’t pragmatism that was guiding her choice. She just needed Killian to respect it.

“Okay,” said Killian. “It’s your plan.”

“Well, sort of,” Emma admitted. “I was kind of counting on you being the one to figure out the whole prison break thing.”

“Done,” said Killian. “Or, that is to say, it will be done. Once I’ve figured out where she’s being held. And how to get in. And how to get her safely to Arendelle.”

“So, a day or two, then?” said Emma.

“Give me a week,” replied Killian, and Emma was only pretty sure that he was joking.

*****

In the end, phase one of the plan was set into motion in a matter of hours. They were awakened that morning by a loud banging on their door, which they opened to find Leroy, holding several sheets of paper in his hand.

“How did you find us?” asked Killian. They had told the Darlings and Ashley where they were going, in case of emergency, but hadn’t made their whereabouts known to the forest at large.

Leroy rolled his eyes. “I’ve lived in Sherwood for five years, Hook. I know your hideaways.” He strode over to Emma, handing her the papers. “A contract,” he explained. “For rebuilding Granny’s.”

“A _contract_?” repeated Emma. “You do realize this isn’t exactly a normal business situation?”

“My guys still need to eat,” answered Leroy, unmoved.

“Let me take a look.” Emma was embarrassed to admit that she had no idea of what constituted a reasonable wage for a team of builders, but she was going to make an educated guess that Leroy was badly overcharging her.

“I’ll promise you _half_ that. And take out the provision about Tom’s allergy medicine. It’s ridiculous.”

“Three-quarters,” said Leroy, confirming Emma’s suspicion that his initial estimate had been wildly inflated.

“Deal,” she said, hoping very much that her parents were going to come through with as much money as she thought they were.

Leroy took back the signed contract, leaving the final page with Emma. “Here’s the preliminary list of supplies,” he said. “Let me know when they come in, and we can start.”

“Wait a second, Leroy,” called Killian as he made to leave. “I have a question for you.” Shooting Emma a significant look, he continued. “You used to do jobs for Regina, correct?”

“Yeah,” said Leroy warily.

“Any chance you know anything about a building where she might be holding a high-level prisoner?”

“I might,” Leroy conceded. “But it’ll cost you. Ninety percent?” he said to Emma.

“See Swan?” said Killian. “ _Some_ people are willing to play hardball to get what they want." 

“Some _douchebags,_ ” grumbled Emma. But she wasn’t biting. “Leroy,” she said. “I know you hate Regina. Especially now. This is really important. Cut the crap.”

Resigned, if not chastened, Leroy began to speak. “Okay, but I need to give you some background first. My father was a miner. I worked with him beginning when I was a teenager, and I hated it. When I got the chance to join a team doing work on the Queen’s residences, I wasn’t thinking about politics, and took it. I guess I should have been more suspicious when I was promoted to the head of the team way sooner than I should have been. The fact was that a lot of people above me had quit – they didn’t want to work for her anymore. But as long as the money came in, I didn’t much care who I was working for, and it wasn’t like building her a swankier mansion was doing anyone real harm.

“And then,” he continued. “I met Astrid.” 

Astrid, it transpired was one of Regina’s attendants. Their relationship started with quick flirtations as he worked, and progressed into stolen meetings and kisses. Astrid seemed determined to keep the relationship hidden, which Leroy had taken as embarrassment over the class difference between them. “I was nothing,” he said. “She was practically royalty.”

Only in retrospect had he understood that she was protecting him. One day, Astrid hadn’t showed up for one of their meetings. Eventually, he learned the truth: Astrid had been a member of a resistance group, and had been placed in Regina’s employ as a spy. Having been found out, she was now in the royal dungeons.

“When I heard, I almost quit on the spot. Except one of the things the Queen had been talking to me about was building a new prison.”

Leroy had bided his time, working faithfully for Regina for another year before she ordered him to begin work on the secure facility – to which he added some improvements of his own. “The site of the building was near an old mineshaft,” he explained. “I dug a passage connecting the jail to the mine, and concealed it behind a false wall. When it was ready, and the prisoners were moved in, I came in one night with a dummy key and got Astrid out.” 

He didn’t mention where she was now, and Emma wondered why, wherever it was, he hadn’t gone with her.

“But Regina knew, right?” asked Emma, remembering what little she had previously known of Leroy’s story. “So she’ll have blocked up the passage.” Not that having someone familiar with the layout of the prison wasn’t going to be hugely useful in its own right, but Emma couldn’t help but be wistful.

“Well,” said Leroy. “She’ll have blocked up that one.”

Exchanging a glance, Emma and Killian settled in for a long day of planning.

*****

By the time Leroy left many hours later, they had a working schematic of the prison – including Leroy’s several additions – and Killian was fairly confident about their chances of getting Anna out. Or, rather, his chances, as he had told Emma in no uncertain terms that he was doing this alone.

“Adding another person just makes it more dangerous,” he argued. “I’ve been doing this for half my life. I’ve seen how brilliant you are in a crisis, but no need to tempt fate.”

“And who do you think Anna is more likely to trust?” countered Emma. “She knows who I am. She also almost definitely knows who _you_ are, which, in this case, is a problem.”

“I wouldn’t have thought I’d have to convince you _,_ of all people, of my abilities as a kidnapper.”

“Yeah, but we don’t just need her to go with you, we need her to persuade Elsa to go to war for us.”

“If you’re right, Elsa’s likely to want to go to war either way, but I also didn’t think I’d have to convince you how _charming_ I can be, once you get to know me.” He drew her into his arms, and began trailing kisses down her neck.

“I’m hoping _that_ ’s not how you’re planning on charming Anna,” joked Emma.

In the end, they had agreed that Emma would wait for Killian in the mineshaft while he entered the prison and retrieved Anna himself. But this was all a moot point until they had arranged for her safe passage back to Arendelle.

“And for that,” said Killian, “we’re going to need to see Jefferson.”

Jefferson, Killian explained, was an expert at getting people across the border. A brilliant forger and master of disguise, he produced fake IDs and, when necessary, fake appearances to go along with them. “A little odd,” Killian added, “But he’s never let me down.”

“A little odd,” thought Emma when they entered Jefferson’s small cottage the next day, was a vast understatement. Jefferson was wearing a top hat, a foppish scarf, and a waistcoat that would have been outdated a century ago. He didn’t offer Emma or Killian a seat, perhaps because all of the chairs around his table were occupied by dolls and stuffed animals. Each toy had a place setting with a teacup, saucer and spoon neatly laid out before it.  

“You’re late, Hook,” he said before Killian could begin to explain why they were there.

“Late for what, mate?” asked Killian cautiously.

“For _everything_ ,” Jefferson answered despairingly. He ran his fingers through his hair distractedly, pacing around the room for a few moments before finally adding “I’ve lost my Grace." 

At first, Emma thought he was speaking metaphorically, but Killian’s face fell as he said “Jefferson, I’m so sorry. What happened to her?”

“She’s not _dead_ ,” said Jefferson with horror. “I’ve _lost_ her. The Queen,” he added, as if this were an all-sufficient explanation. Which, Emma suddenly realized, it was.

“Wait. Grace is _your_ kid?” said Emma. A little over a year ago, Regina had begun making appearances accompanied by a little girl named Grace. Supposedly, she had rescued her from an abusive home. Emma had figured that Regina’s interest in the kid was mostly PR, but she had never imagined she had simply _stolen_ her.

Jefferson picked up the tea kettle, and produced two laminated cards from underneath, passing them to Emma. The first was the ID of a man who was recognizable as Jefferson himself, although the card was in the name of Sebastian. The second bore the picture of a little girl who, according to the document, was nine years old and named Paige.

“We were going to get out,” Jefferson said. “It was time. Long past. Risking my neck was one thing. Never hers. But the Queen knew.” His narration still wasn’t of the most consecutive variety, but it was enough to get his meaning across. “Gave me a deal. Behind door number one, I go down for treason and never see Grace again. She winds up abandoned in the middle of the forest. Door number two, I survive, free, and Grace goes to live in a mansion with all the dresses and toys and food she could ever want. I get pictures and letters. Which would you have chosen?”

It wasn’t a choice at all, Emma thought. It was part of Regina’s cruelty to have pretended that it was. Jefferson, clearly, had been driven half mad with the guilt of it.

“That was fifteen months ago. Fifteen months, one week, five days, four hours and…” he consulted a pocket watch, but then threw it to the floor, shattering the glass face. “I’ve lost track of the minutes!” he moaned. “I used to know it to the _second_ , and now I don’t remember. Was it 3:15? Or 3:30? High tea was supposed to be at 4:00,” he said, gesturing toward the table. “So it was before that. But how long before?”

“Jefferson,” said Killian, obviously trying to stop this frantic train of thought, “You did the best for Grace that you could at the time. You have nothing to blame yourself for. She’s lucky to have you as a father. But Emma and I are trying to bring down Regina, for good. If we manage it, you’ll be able to get your daughter back. And you can help.”

“No one can fight Regina,” said Jefferson dismissively. “Do you know she even lied about the pictures and letters? The only pictures of Grace I’ve seen have come from newspapers. She looked _awful_." 

This, Emma thought, was a matter of opinion; as far as she knew, Grace was at least impeccably well cared for. But rather than contradicting Jefferson, she briefly explained their plan for freeing Anna.

When she had finished, Jefferson said “Not good enough.”

“What?”

“It’s good,” Jefferson elaborated. “But not good enough. Too many what-ifs and maybes. If I’m going to help you, I need a little insurance.”

“Insurance?” asked Killian. 

“I’ll forge papers for your girl. I’ll wait for you in your mineshaft and when she gets out, her own mother wouldn’t recognize her. But under one condition. When you come with her, you bring Grace with you.”

“Jefferson, be reasonable!” said Killian. “You’re asking me to kidnap a child from right under Regina’s nose!”

“How you manage it is your business,” said Jefferson, calmer than he had yet been about anything.  “But if you want my help, that’s my price.”

And Emma could see in his face that, this time, it would be useless to argue further.

*****

“Give us a few minutes,” said Killian at last. Jefferson retreated into the other room. Killian, after a moment of indecision, removed a teddy bear from one of the chairs, and sat down. He tried to rest the stuffed animal on the table, but when he had difficulty finding a spot where it wouldn’t risk disturbing the tea settings, he gave up and put it in his own lap. Emma repeated the process with a rag doll on the adjoining seat.

“We could risk trying to get Anna out without documentation,” said Killian. “It would be harder, but it’s been done.”

“But if it doesn’t work, _we’re_ done,” Emma objected. “It’s not like we have a ton of plan Bs if we can’t get Anna out.”

Killian thought for a moment. “If we were to agree to it, I would have to do it at some big event where we could be sure that Regina would bring Grace. A place where there would be plenty of guests, and a lot of room for a distraction.”

“The Queen’s birthday,” said Emma at once. “It’s next month. She throws a huge party every year, and there’s no way she’s not showing off her newest little pet.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to get hold of an invitation,” he mused. “Or get Jefferson to dummy up a press pass. And Regina’s mansion isn’t far from the prison. I could pass Grace off to you in the mineshaft, then go back for Anna.”

But Emma had come to what seemed to her a very obvious conclusion. “Killian,” she said patiently, “You’re a notorious criminal. And you have a _metal hand_." 

“So?” he said defensively. “Hasn’t held me back before.”

“Not if the point is to thumb your nose at Regina, but this time, we _wouldn’t_ want her knowing who you are. Even if you wore a disguise and went without the hook, she’s going to be suspicious of a guy with one hand.”

She was right, and he knew it. “Jefferson,” she called, before he could raise any other objection. When he reappeared – scowling when he saw them sitting at the table – she said, “You said that you could disguise Anna so that even her own mother wouldn’t know her. Was that true, or an exaggeration?”

“I don’t exaggerate,” he said.

”You’d better not be,” said Emma. “Because that’s _exactly_ how good a disguise I’m going to need.”


	11. Masquerade

The complication that Jefferson had added to the plan meant another five weeks of waiting. Selfishly, Emma couldn’t help but be grateful for the delay. 

Some of it was simple pragmatism. The extra time gave them room for much more substantial planning; if Regina’s birthday had been the following week, they would have managed it somehow, but it would have been tight. Even the smallest details were important if they were going to pull this off. When Killian had proudly presented Emma with a quite lovely outfit for the occasion, Emma had had to give him a crash-course in the difference between cocktail dresses and evening gowns, and when to wear each. Ever the quick learner, he had returned with a more appropriate substitute the next time around. As she tried it on, Emma reflected that even if they a _did_ find a way of dealing with the extensive list of valid criminal charges against Killian when this was all over, he was going to be banned for life from pretty much every store that existed, and probably some that hadn’t opened yet for good measure.

Emma had her own lessons to attend to as well. Regina’s mansion was about ten miles from the prison, which was not a feasible distance for an on-foot escape with a nine-year-old. Which meant Emma was going to have to learn how to hot-wire a car.

“They do say that couples should share hobbies,” said Killian rather gleefully as they went off to an out-of-the-way impound lot for practice. It was, Emma realized with a start, the first time they had been together outside the borders of the forest. _Our first date,_ she thought wryly.

Aloud, she teased, “What happened to the whole tortured guilt thing? Grand theft auto too petty to make the list?”

“Well it’s not like I’ve actually ever _kept_ a stolen car. So it’s basically borrowing.”

“Guess I’ll still be the one teaching the kids ethics,” said Emma, and while it was only a joke, she immediately regretted it. Since the first day, one of the implicit rules of their relationship had been that they didn’t talk about the future.

It wasn’t that Emma had any doubt that both of them wanted one; it had become clear to her very quickly that Killian was it for her, and he made it equally clear to her that he felt the same in any number of unspoken ways. It was that both of them, in their different ways, weren’t sure that they could have one.

For Emma, the doubts were more immediate. They were playing a deadly dangerous game, and there were no guarantees for either of them. Killian’s, she was fairly sure, were longer-term. Having lived a life in which grave risk of physical danger was all in a day’s work, he was more sanguine than Emma about their prospects of success. _His_ problem was figuring out what success, real success, would look like for him. Emma suspected, from occasional comments that he had let drop, that his idea of a post-Regina future involved fleeing to some remote land and eking out a semi-honest existence somehow; he was nothing if not a survivor.

If it came to it, Emma had no intention of letting him go alone. She wouldn’t, under a fair-minded regime, be a wanted woman, and could come and go from wherever they wound up as she pleased, but she was making a life with Killian no matter what it took. Yet though she didn’t want to get his hopes up by vocalizing it, Emma herself was hoping for better things. If this worked, if it _really_ worked, Killian was not only going to have saved the Prime Minister of Arendelle’s sister, but to have been one of the key players behind the fall of a tyrant. Between the two countries, Emma thought there was a good chance of a pardon in one or asylum in the other, especially given that most of the crimes Killian was actually guilty of would be hard to prove or had been committed in the context of a wholly corrupt system.

Still, Emma wasn’t taking chances. Privately, she had talked to Jefferson about getting fake passports for both of them, which would, even with their mutual recognizability, be at least some help if it came to an escape. 

As they drew closer to the date of Regina’s party, however Emma couldn’t help but be struck by the uncomfortable feeling that, whatever happened, things were going to change. This, if she were honest, was the real reason she was grateful for the delay: it gave her a grace period where they _could_ still plan for tomorrow and not think too hard about the day after. 

One thing was certain: after they freed Grace and Anna, they couldn’t come back to Sherwood. Whatever Regina had been willing to tolerate for the sake of a longer strategic game before now, kidnapping her kid and freeing a prized state prisoner, not to mention one whose release was very likely to lead to war, was going to raise the stakes in the most dramatic way possible. They couldn’t stay in a place she already knew they were hiding. 

Killian’s plan was to make for one of the shore communities that would be nearly empty in the off-season and squat in a vacant summer home. It didn’t actually sound bad to Emma; their standard of living was bound to increase substantially after the move. But for one thing, everything would after that be contingent on plans that were, for the first time, thoroughly out of their control. Would Elsa come through? How long would it take? Would she and Anna be willing to find a way of communicating with Killian and Emma, or would they consider it more prudent to cut their ties with their…problematic sources of aid as soon as they could? What would Killian and Emma do in the meantime, and how should they react if they _did_ wake one morning to the news that Regina had been toppled in the night? 

Aside from that, it meant leaving Sherwood. For better or worse – and Emma still believed, since the fire, that it had been worse – the forest had become Emma’s home, _their_ home. And, despite Emma’s resolution on the day of Granny’s funeral to keep herself apart, the forest seemed determined not to allow her to retreat too far. Only a day or two after Emma and Killian had met with Jefferson, Ashley had appeared at their door, Alexandra and three other small children in tow, all determined to resume lessons. Later in the week, it had been two teenagers, and a day after that, one of the oldest of Emma’s students, who responded to her protestations about danger with a defiant “They haven’t managed to kill me yet.”

In the end, Emma wound up with a small but not insubstantial percentage of her former students stopping by regularly for private lessons. She had also begun meeting with Wendy Darling with the goal of preparing the girl to resume regular instruction of at least the younger students sometime soon. In the meantime, on the first of the month, a the first of what promised to be a recurring monthly payment from a Mr. James Snow had hit the account of Killian’s contact: Tink had come through, and so had Emma’s parents. With the first of the money, Leroy and his crew had begun to take the preliminary steps toward the rebuilding of Granny’s, though a formal groundbreaking would have to wait until the spring. 

When he told her this, Emma thought that she understood better now what Killian had meant when he had talked about preparing for a world you had no place in. Because amidst her joy at the promise of renewal emerging from the ruins, Emma couldn’t help but reflect that by the time the first brick was laid, she would be long gone from the forest.

***** 

“What a lovely dress; where did you get it?” exclaimed a woman Emma recognized at once as Aurora Briars. She and her husband, Philip, had been friends of the Nolans for years. The fact that she didn’t suspect Emma was a very good sign.

 _You couldn’t have started with an easier question?_ thought Emma, but she parried the charge gracefully. “I’d be embarrassed to tell you,” she said, running a hand through her long red wig with studied self-consciousness. “Honestly, this isn’t quite my usual scene. I’m very lucky to be here. Lily Page,” Emma added, extending her hand.

“Aurora Briars,” said the other woman. “I’m a member of the council. What brings you to the Queen’s party?”

“It’s kind of been a whirlwind. I used to be in media, but left to found a literacy non-profit about a year ago, working mostly with underprivileged children. We’re not all that big yet, to be honest – but the Queen has expressed interest in our mission. Maybe her ward has influenced her,” she finished, in what she hoped wasn’t too transparent a grab for information. Regina was MIA so far, but it couldn’t hurt for Emma to feel out the situation.

“Yes, it was so kind of her to take in Grace,” said Aurora. Her tone was perfectly polite, but Emma thought it had grown slightly stiff. _Good for you, Aurora_ , thought Emma. Given the consequences for open dissent, it was often hard to tell how even your closest friends really felt about Regina’s rule, and Emma liked to think that the Briarses, who had always seemed like decent people, were less than enchanted with the Queen. “I’m going to go for a drink. Would you like to walk over with me? I can introduce you to a few people.”

“Thank you,” said Emma. Apart from the promise of a painless entrée into the evening’s society, a little bit of liquid courage couldn’t hurt. 

The truth was, though, that this part was easy, almost scarily so. Killian and Jefferson, when they had discussed the plan, had both been very concerned about Emma blending in and keeping her cover. It had been their advice to try to stick as close to elements of the truth as was at all feasible, and Emma was, mostly, doing it.

She _would_ be embarrassed to tell Aurora where, or at least how, she had gotten her dress. She _did_ teach underprivileged children to read, and if she wasn’t exactly part of a registered charitable foundation, it was certainly true that her efforts were, in fact, entirely non-profit. And Regina had indeed expressed an interest in Emma’s activities; Emma had just neglected to mention that that interest had been expressed in firebombing an inn rather than inviting her to a party.

But not all of it was true, and of all the lies, maybe the most egregious one was this: _this isn’t my usual scene_.

For this to work, Lily Page had to be an outsider, a fringe invite who wouldn’t be expected to know anyone. Emma Nolan, on the other hand, had been invited to this party just last year, and had actually attended for a few years before that. Blending in wasn’t going to be a problem.

Because she _knew_ these people, and not just because Aurora and Philip weren’t the only guests who actually had been members of the Nolans’ social circle. These were people who did know the difference between types of formalwear, who had perfected the right way of holding a martini glass, who could dance a Viennese Waltz and talk about their favorite violinists and swap stories about being outbid at art auctions.

It was tempting, so tempting to mock them, to dismiss them as trivial, superficial aristocrats who Emma had outgrown. But that would be too easy. They were _privileged_ , as Emma’s parents were, as she herself had been, until very recently. Yet, she thought, that didn’t make them bad; it just made them lucky. With infinitely fewer resources, plenty of people in Sherwood lived selfish lives dedicated to pursuit of whatever meaningless pleasures were available to them, too. By the same token, plenty of people in her parents’ world were genuinely good people, loving to those around them, charitable to those less fortunate – Emma was glad that they had thought of printing business cards for her, because a _lot_ of people she talked to had asked how they could donate. 

And if they also had the luxury of cultivating tastes in art and orchestra, in fine wine and fashion, well, appreciating those things didn’t make you inherently frivolous either. In many ways, this environment was still more relaxing, more natural to Emma than the forest had ever been. Getting Tink to help her, or negotiating with Leroy was a performance. Making small-talk at a soiree was coming home. 

As if on cue, Aurora’s voice suddenly cut into her thoughts. “Oh! Philip look, Mary Margaret and David are here. I’ll go and speak to them. Can’t be easy for them, poor things.”

Emma had avoided thinking about this part of what she had to do as much as possible. She wasn’t all that worried about them recognizing her. Besides the red wig, Jefferson, operating under the principle that the trick of disguise was being as conspicuous as possible in ways totally unlike your actual appearance, had fitted her with bright blue contacts she wore under a truly hideous pair of glasses. With the aid of makeup, he had given her the appearance of a middle-aged woman of about her parents’ own age, and had made her complexion a shade or two darker than its ordinary pale white. 

But these were her parents, and she hadn’t seen them for months. The risk wasn’t that they would recognize her. It was that Emma wouldn’t be able to resist revealing herself to _them_.

She wondered, as she watched them across the room, how much Tink had told them. Knowing Tink, it would have been as little as she could get away with. They would know, obviously, that Emma had been living in Sherwood.  She assumed Tink would have told them something about Emma’s teaching. Would she have told them about Killian? If she did, what had they thought?

Possibly, it was only Emma’s guilt speaking, but she thought that her mother looked thinner than she remembered, her face slightly drawn. She noticed a few people pointing and whispering as they made their way through the room, and could guess what they were talking about. The Nolans had always had to walk a careful line, socially and politically speaking, and their daughter’s very public treason couldn’t have helped matters. Emma was glad that they had arrived before Regina had come down, and were spared the always humiliating experience of paying their formal respects to her upon entry, a ritual the Queen clearly reveled in. 

Regina, today, was apparently more interested in the ritual of her _own_ entry, delayed for maximum effect. About an hour after the party had started, a trumpet sounded with a familiar fanfare, and a hush fell over the room. Two lines of attendants formed along the aisle leading into the ballroom as the lights dimmed, a spotlight appeared at the entrance and the doors opened to reveal Regina, dressed in her usual garish array, a little girl by her side. Everyone applauded, making enough of a din that Emma thought some of it had to be sincere. 

As Regina and Grace assumed seats on the raised dais, Emma realized with consternation that the time had come for her to start thinking seriously about how she was going to pull this off. Killian, who had built his Captain Hook identity around a flair for flamboyant showmanship, wouldn’t have had any trouble finding a way to get Grace out, trusting to sheer brazenness to smooth over any difficulties. If you acted like you had a right to do whatever you were doing, he had once explained to Emma, people were often too polite to contradict you. But to Emma, who – unlike Killian would have – had had no trouble getting in and staying in without drawing attention to herself, the thought of getting Grace out from under Regina’s nose was a far more daunting proposition. Especially, she considered as she looked at the child, who had leaned over to whisper something to Regina, given that she wasn’t entirely sure how much Grace wanted to be saved. She hadn’t dared to mention the possibility to Jefferson, but fifteen months was a long time in the life of a nine-year-old, and Regina was fully capable of showing superficial care and concern, not to mention of spinning poisonous lies that might set Grace against her father.

Whatever Emma was going to do, she had about three hours to do it. If she wasn’t at the mineshaft by midnight, they had agreed, Killian was going to assume something had gone wrong and come looking for her. 

When they sat for dinner, Emma deliberately placed herself as far as possible from her parents, sitting at a table with a man named Gaston who she had met earlier in the evening. She had gotten the impression that he _really_ liked to talk about himself, which would make conversation easy and probably give her plenty of opportunities to tune out and think.

Unfortunately for Gaston, his was only the second largest ego in the room, and as the owner of the largest one happened to be the literal Queen, he soon had to cut his monologue short as she began her speech. 

“Thank you all for being here,” she said as the requisite applause died down. “This is my birthday, but really, I like to look at this day as a celebration, not of me, but of another year of peace and prosperity for our kingdom.”

Emma really, really regretted that she couldn’t let herself get drunk right now.

“This is not a day for politics. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that we must remain vigilant in the face of continuing threats against that peace, and ask you, in light of these threats, to urge members of the council to approve the bill granting my forces the expanded powers of information-gathering and enforcement needed to keep all of us safe. Why, just weeks ago, my intelligence uncovered evidence that a gang of miscreants under the command of the infamous criminal styling himself Captain Hook” – Emma couldn’t help the flinch, and just had to hope no one had noticed – “had been working on a plot to set off explosives at this very event. Fortunately, one of their bombs went off prematurely, destroying their base of operations and killing several of their leaders.”

Emma had enough control of herself by now not to react. On her last words, Regina had looked deliberately toward Mary Margaret and David, infuriating Emma even further; _she_ knew that her parents knew that she hadn’t been killed in the fire, but Regina couldn’t.

“Make no mistake, we will bring Hook, and anyone who may be abetting him, to justice. But this should only reinforce the need to give law enforcement every tool at their disposal to root out our enemies. This has become all the more important to me since I adopted my darling Grace, who could otherwise so easily have become one of the casualties of the lawlessness and violence plaguing our less privileged communities. And to lose a child,” she concluded, with another pointed look at the Nolans, “well, nothing could be more terrible.” 

 _Hopefully,_ thought Emma, _you’re about to find out_. Now that Regina’s speech was done, a crowd of people had begun to move forward to get their moment to curry favor with the Queen, leaving Grace comparatively unattended back at the table. Emma had decided to look for an opportune moment to speak to the child and get a sense of her attitudes toward Regina and her father. If it seemed like Grace was going to be amenable to an escape, she would level with her and they could work out the best exit route from there. If not, she would wait until Grace had been taken off to bed, and trust that she could be at least menacing enough to frighten a child into coming with her, terrible as she would feel doing it. It was, she had to admit, a slightly vague plan, but there was nothing else for it; though she and Killian had discussed various scenarios beforehand, there was only so much you could prepare for in advance, and Emma would just have to rely on the improvisational abilities that had served her before.

Needing to concentrate, but anxious to avoid looking aimless or out of place, Emma walked over toward the bar. But almost as soon as she had reached it, she was distracted by a high, false voice calling “Mary Margaret! Darling! We were just talking about you!”

Emma hadn’t realized the path to the bar would take her so close to her parents’ table. From where she was standing, she could see her mother’s face as Cruella continued; her father was engaged in conversation with someone on the other side of the table, and wasn’t listening.

“Mal and I were just saying how very _brave_ you are, being here after everything. But of course you mustn’t think anyone _blames_ you, dear. We know you did _everything_ for that child. Some people are just bad apples.”

Mary Margaret smiled sweetly, and said, very distinctly, “Yes, some people _are_ simply rotten. Thank you so much for reminding me, Cruella. Now if you’ll excuse me, I was just going to get a drink.” 

Cruella, Emma was pleased to see, looked less than gratified by the response her barb had gotten. But once she had walked past the other woman, her mother’s smile dropped completely, and she allowed her lip to tremble slightly before visibly pulling herself back together.

All at once, Emma’s plans changed. The scenarios she had run through with Killian were all based on his own exploits. But Emma, for all she lacked in experience and physical prowess, had one advantage he had never had: she wasn’t alone, not really. And, as the exchange with Cruella had reminded her, her mom could be a total badass.

Plus, discretion be damned, Emma wasn’t letting her suffer a second longer than she had to. Even under present circumstances, Emma thought that, assuming she got away with this, it would reassure her mother to have seen her.

Cruella had given her another idea as well. Pouring a red apple martini, she touched her mother on the arm. “Excuse me, you’re Mary Margaret Nolan, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said politely. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. What’s your name?" 

“Lily Page,” said Emma, and briefly launched into her – or rather Lily’s – story. When she finished, she handed her still-full glass to her mother, and tried to inject her next words with the same deliberate significance Mary Margaret herself had used in her retort to Cruella.  “Would you like to try an appletini as red as blood?”

“No thank you I –“ began Mary Margaret, and froze. She had recognized the line, as Emma knew she would. It had been from one of Emma’s favorite storybooks, as a child, and she could still recite it, like an incantation, word for word. _For the spell to work, we need four ingredients: a cow as white as milk, hair as yellow as corn, a slipper as pure as gold, an apple as red as blood_. Even outside the storybook, it had become a game for Emma, as she tried seriously to determine whether any cows, blondes, shoes and apples she might encounter fit the bill. 

Mary Margaret studied Emma’s face carefully, and said slowly, after a few moments,  “I would like to help with your charity in any way I can. If there’s anything I can do…”

“Thanks,” said Emma, reaching into her bag and handing her a card. “But frankly, with all the work I’ve been putting into this, the most help you could give me tonight would be a _distraction_.”

Emma watched as her words sank in. “Of course,” she said. “Although I really should return to my husband, right now. It was nice meeting you, Lily.”

She held out her hand, and Emma shook it, aching, as she knew her mother must be, to throw her arms around her. Before she turned away, Mary Margaret said, “I don’t want to be…presumptuous, but as you’re…newer to philanthropy, I did want to warn you to make sure you’re trusting the right people. There are always those who will try to take advantage.”

Emma smiled, a real one, this time. No matter what the circumstances, a mom was still a mom. Whenever Killian finally met her parents, he was going to be in for some serious third-degree. “I have people I can trust,” she assured her. “Really, I do.”

When Mary Margaret returned to the table, she immediately got David’s attention, and a minute later they were heading to the dance floor. Emma kept an eye on them as she fielded light conversational sallies from others at the bar, and could see the moment where her mother leaned forward and whispered something in her father’s ear. His step faltered, and when he recovered, he quickly adjusted their positions so that he could get a look at Emma for himself. She nodded minutely, the only acknowledgment she could risk.  

When the waltz ended, David, to Emma’s astonishment, walked over and offered his arm to _Regina_. She was really, really going to owe him when this was all over.

Emma was about to approach Grace while Regina was busy dancing, but at a quick shake of her head from her mother, she held back. Apparently, they had something better in mind. This was confirmed when, at the end of the dance, David and Regina left the room together.

Emma hoped fervently that there was a political pretext to justify this, or else she was really, _really_ going to owe her father when this was all over. Not to mention her mother.

Allowing a few minutes to pass to avoid suspicion, she walked over to Grace, who was watching as the caterers put out dessert.

“Wow, a chocolate fountain. Pretty cool,” said Emma.

“I’m not really supposed to eat much candy,” said Grace ruefully.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” she replied, with a conspiratorial wink. The dessert course hadn’t begun yet, but Emma made a show of looking both ways before grabbing a strawberry, running it under the fountain and popping it into her mouth.  When she was done, she licked the spare chocolate off her fingers, making a “shh!” sign. Grace giggled.

“Can I tell you another secret?” Again, this wasn’t what she had planned, but it felt suddenly _right_. “My name is Emma, and I’m not really supposed to be here.” 

Grace’s eyes widened. “Are you _that_ Emma? My mom really doesn’t like you.”

Emma’s heart sank slightly at Grace’s use of “my mom,” but it was too late to reverse course now. “No, but your father does.”

Grace looked around in obvious excitement. “Is he here? Did he come back for me?”

“He’s waiting nearby. He sent me to get you. Look,” said Emma, opening her bag widely enough so that Grace could see the stuffed rabbit she had brought with her from Jefferson's home. Grace reached for it, but Emma quickly closed the bag. “You can have it later, but we have to be careful now. Go outside. If anyone stops you, say you need to get a toy from…your mom’s car. I’ll –“

But just then, Emma’s job got a lot easier, as the room went pitch black. A few people screamed. _Thanks, Mom_ , thought Emma, and she grabbed Grace’s hand and darted for the door.

*****

“Where’s my dad?” demanded Grace as Emma urged her forward, putting more distance between themselves and the mansion.

“He’s waiting for us. I just need to find my car,” said Emma, scanning over the parked Mercedes and Lexuses in search of a likely mark. Her eyes stopped on a beat-up yellow bug. “There it is.”

Grace, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice that Emma wasn’t precisely using a key to get the car started. Nor did she object when Emma led them, once they had parked, to what must have looked to her like a hole in the ground. But then, Emma reflected, she _had_ been raised by Jefferson. Speaking of Jefferson…

“Grace!” he shouted, as he ran forward, passing the lantern in his hand to Emma as he rushed to embrace his daughter.

Watching the two cry in each other’s arms, Emma thought that even if all else failed, having reunited Jefferson and Grace meant that the night wouldn’t be a total loss. But only a few minutes later, Emma heard voices in the narrow passage and held the light out in front of her to reveal Killian and a rather dazed-looking Anna.

“We actually did it,” she said, leaning over to kiss him.

“Will someone PLEASE explain to me what’s going on,” Anna interrupted.

Emma and Killian broke apart. Realizing that she was still in disguise, she threw off the wig and glasses and used the inside of her dress to dab off as much of the makeup as she could manage. Her hair, while still much shorter than she usually wore it, had mostly returned to its natural color, leaving her recognizable.

“Hey, Anna.”

“ _Emma Nolan_?” exclaimed the other woman. “Whoa. I was just getting used to the whole Captain Hook kind of being a good guy thing – which, pretty trippy – and you were pretty much the last person I was expecting to see. Well, not the _last last_ because, like, I guess the Pope could have been here, or the Sultan of Agrabah, and really anyone who wasn’t Elsa, or Kristoff, or Regina, if we’d been busted, would have been a surprise. But still. Kind of random! And so you and Captain Hook are a thing. Didn’t see that coming either! Not that I’ve really seen anyone, given that I’ve been in a cell for apparently two whole years. But still, congratulations! I’m sure he’s really nice when you get past the whole” – she made a vague slashing movement with her arm – “thing. And he got me out, so really, no complaints here! Would you believe he was the first person I’d spoken to in two _years_?”

“Actually, yeah,” said Emma. Anna hadn’t been shy when Emma had met her before, but this was…. different.

“Well _I_ couldn’t. Like, seriously, it _seemed_ like forever, but I figured it was going to be one of those perspective things where actually it was like, five days or something and then Elsa would say ‘Anna, you’re such a drama queen,’ and I’d say ‘Well you’re such a drama _Prime Minister’_ and she must be really freaking out, huh? How come she sent _you_ to get me?”

“She didn’t,” said Emma, and launched into her explanation, finishing with “Jefferson will help you make it to Arendelle. But Anna, you’ve gotta make sure Elsa moves _fast_. We’ve put ourselves on the line here, and a lot of other people, too. I saw her tonight. She’s trying to take more power, starting with a big move against the people of the forest. She catches me, she might get what she wants faster, but even without that it’s only a matter of time.”

“You can count on me, Chief,” said Anna, with a salute. After a beat, she added, “Sorry. I’ve just always wanted to say that. But really, I owe you guys one. Or, like, a million. And Elsa’s going to want to help. I know she will.” 

And, as Emma watched Anna, Jefferson and Grace walk away a few minutes later, she could do nothing but hope desperately that she was right.

*****

“ _That’s_ our getaway car?” said Killian when Emma led him to the yellow bug.

“It was this or a Mercedes. You said not to pick something too flashy.”

“It’s _neon yellow_.”

“I was under pressure. Shut up. And I’m driving,” she added as he went for the driver’s side.

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that at no point in your checkered past have you actually been issued a valid driver’s license.”

“If we get pulled over, I really don’t think _driving without a license_ is going to be the thing that gets us into trouble.”

Ultimately, they changed drivers halfway through, when they abandoned the bug for another car. Actually, the bug’s conspicuousness was in some respects an advantage, as they wanted their car to be found. Killian had told Jefferson to wait a few hours and then call in a sighting of Hook in an area about halfway between Regina’s and the coast, far enough from their final destination for (relative) safety but also far enough from Sherwood to draw the Queen’s attention elsewhere. 

A few miles from the coast, they ditched the second car, too, this one in a far less obvious location. Emma was surprised when, at the end of their walk, Killian led her, not to the windswept cottage she had been expecting, but to one of the huge mansions dotting the coastline. “Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” he said, when she looked at him questioningly, but he didn’t quite meet her eyes as he said it.

“Come on,” said Emma. “I don’t believe you stayed somewhere like this the last time you needed oceanfront property.”

“I didn’t,” he admitted. “But you weren’t with me, then.”

“Killian, you know you didn’t have to do that. I think I’ve proven I can make do with a lot less.”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t have to,” he said, as he tossed some wood into the fireplace. The owners of this home might notice if their squatters ran up an electric bill. He lit it aflame, and took her hand as they both drew closer to the warmth. “I’ve always known you deserved better, but these last few weeks, when I saw you in that dress, when we planned and you talked about the kinds of people who would be at this party, how it would be set up, what kinds of things you would say and do to avoid attracting too much notice –you belong in a place like this.”

It was a version of her own thoughts from earlier, reflected back at her. But as she looked at him, there was only one answer to give.

“I belong with you,” she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Though I’ll admit the house is pretty nice.”

“Let’s go to bed,” he said. “I’m used to this kind of thing, but the nerves, seeing your parents – you must be ready to drop.”

“Soon,” said Emma. “But first, there’s one thing I didn’t get to do tonight.”

“What’s that?”

Emma stood across from him, positioning his arms around her waist and placing hers around his neck. “Mr. Jones,” she said, “I’m going to teach you to dance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The cow as white as milk, the hair as yellow as gold..." comes from Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods." Sondheim's version actually had "the cape as red as blood," rather than "the apple," but as OuaT changed it to an apple for the title of 1x21, I thought I could do the same. 
> 
> In my mind, by the way, Emma's childhood storybook is a lot closer to the whimsical first act of "Into the Woods" than the much darker second, although in many ways, this is the story of Emma moving from the former kind of world to the latter. Some of you may have noticed another Into the Woods reference in an earlier chapter, when Emma mentions a widowed baker with a baby as one of the forest residents that she and Killian are helping.


	12. All Over

After that, things moved very quickly. Scarcely two weeks after Emma and Killian had left Sherwood, they were awakened by three large, official-looking men who seemed utterly unperturbed by having found their marks completely naked in bed; given their limited wardrobes, the two had dispensed with nightwear some time ago. Especially considering how often they had wound up taking it off in the course of their nightly activities even when they had still been in the habit of wearing it.

Killian didn’t seem more concerned with his own state of undress than their guests, though he did have the grace to pull the blanket further up Emma’s body. “Hello, lads,” he said. “Pity Prime Minister Elsa didn’t come herself. She’s missing out.”

And now, Emma was actually embarrassed. So much for a good first impression. She could only hope these guys really were as humorless as they seemed, and wouldn’t find it necessary to include a full report to Elsa.

A few minutes later, they were dressed and following the guards to an unassuming boat docked in the harbor. In the cabin, they found Elsa of Arendelle waiting for them, looking rather formidable in a blue dress, fur cape, and elegant white gloves. She did not offer any greeting to Emma and Killian beyond a curt “Sit.”

“I suppose you’re expecting a thank-you,” she said when they had complied. “But I know you didn’t rescue my sister out of the goodness of your hearts. You needed me to solve your Regina problem. It was strategy. That’s all.”

“With all due respect, Prime Minister,” said Killian, “I don’t have a Regina problem. If she could have touched me, I would have been dead fifty times over. If I wanted out, I could have gotten a lot further than Arendelle any time these past ten years, at least. The reason I’m here right now is the same reason you are: because she’s a vicious witch who needs to be taken out, and no one else was lining up to volunteer.”

“Pity it took so long for your conscience to catch up to you,” said Elsa coldly. “From what I understand, you’ve been rather less high-minded in the past.”

“And you had the army of Arendelle at your disposal five years before Regina had your sister as a hostage to hold you back. Only you wanted to play politics first.”

“Some of us have to work _within_ the law.”

“If you wanted to work within the law, Prime Minister, then what are you doing here?”

Ignoring his question, Elsa turned to Emma. “Miss Nolan. Do you trust this man?”

“Yeah,” said Emma. “I do.”

“Then this will make what I’m going to ask easier.”

Elsa began pacing around the small cabin, sounding more as if she was talking to herself than to Emma and Killian. Emma suspected she had had versions of this conversation with no audience to hear it many times before.

“I don’t want a war, and I think it is possible to remove Regina without one. My intelligence informs me that there is massive dissatisfaction in her ranks. Her men obey her out of fear, nothing more. If she isn’t there to give them orders, they’ll desert to anyone willing to offer them mercy. There are already mechanisms in place to fill the vacuum. But I need her out of the way, and she’s grown paranoid, practically a recluse. Her movements outside the mansion are unpredictable, deliberately so.”

Emma had always believed that Regina’s habit of making only rare and unexpected appearances at public events was a function of her love of drama and attention. Elsa’s words put another spin on the tactic.

“I need her out of the way,” repeated Elsa, and this time, she was looking at Emma. “And I can think of one thing that will be more likely than any other to draw her out.”

“Absolutely not,” said Killian, before Emma could reply. “You want to use Emma as _bait_? So much for your precious scruples.”

“It’s a risk,” Elsa admitted, her tone softer than it had been yet. “But she won’t be alone. You’ll be there. And my forces will be coming. You just have to delay her long enough so that they have time to follow.”

“What makes you think Regina will buy it?” asked Emma. “She knows Killian and I have been working together, at the very least. If he was going to ransom me to her,” she said, thinking of those first days together, and her suspicions, “he would have done it months ago.”

Killian ran his hand over his face. “Except I’ve just raised your value,” he said bitterly. “Anna’s free. Which makes you more important. She’ll think I was just biding my time to up the asking price.”

“She’ll believe it because she wants to believe it,” said Elsa. Her voice, in its way, was as bitter as Killian’s had been, and Emma wondered if more than her sister’s long captivity had disillusioned her since she had burst onto the scene as a young idealist eight years ago.

“I’ll do it,” declared Emma. “But I have one condition.”

Both Elsa and Killian waited. “I do this, _we_ do this, and you grant Killian asylum in Arendelle.”

 “What are you --” Killian began, but Elsa interrupted.

“Impossible. I know full well Regina’s been using him as a scapegoat, but I expect he’s done plenty he needs to answer for, and by rights he’ll be Arthur’s to deal with. I’m not coming here as a conqueror.”

Emma didn’t ask who Arthur was, although she thought she could guess. There had been rumors that the exiles who had fled to Arendelle had kept up a shadow government for all these years, preparing for the day when they would return.

“Then no deal,” said Emma. Elsa had gone too far to back out now; Emma was holding the winning card.

“You would gamble with the lives of a kingdom for one man’s safety?” said the other woman.

“Like you did for one woman’s?” retorted Emma.

Elsa had no reply to that. “Very well,” she sighed. “If the two of you succeed in drawing Regina out and occupying her until my troops can secure her, he gets asylum.” 

“Swan,” said Killian. “I can’t let you do this for me.”

She smiled. “Arrogant, much? I’m doing this for everyone. You’re just a perk.”

Elsa coughed discreetly, returning them to the matter at hand. “My contacts can help you get a message to Regina, but I want to scout out the area well before we set the time and place. Where do you want to meet her?”

Emma knew what he was going to say before he had opened his mouth.

“Sherwood Forest, of course.”

*****

They had come full circle. Emma didn’t know these woods nearly as well as Killian did, but as they passed a spot near where she thought she had met him, she could almost hear their voices echoing across the seven months that separated the two scenes.

 _I know who you are_.

_I thought you might. But more to the point, I know who you are, Miss Nolan. Or should I say, Miss Swan?_

This time, she had allowed him to tie her arms loosely behind her, a gag in her mouth for good measure. If this had been real, Emma wouldn’t have been coming quietly, and gagging her spared them the need for an act. She might be able to hear the echoes of their last encounter in this place, but things had changed so profoundly between them that she couldn’t be confident in their ability to slip back into the old roles like a second skin. Or, at least, in her own ability to do so. Part of the disgust in Killian’s voice when he had explained why he thought Regina would buy his betrayal, Emma knew, was at the ease with which he himself had come up with the idea: Captain Hook _would_ be mindful that the value of his hostage had increased.

In other respects, however, his supposed plan was well outside Hook’s usual repertoire. Killian might be careful about plotting his way _into_ various settings, but once inside, he normally thrived on chaos, relying on surprising and wrong-footing his opponents. Having taken his own life so lightly for so long, he had also been able to take advantage of the fact that they would have more to lose from any encounter than he did. Meeting Regina by prearrangement, with Emma, was a different matter, and neither Killian nor Emma was entirely comfortable with the situation. But between Killian, Emma and Elsa, they had come up with a ransom note that they believed would convince a desperate Queen not to try anything too ambitious, warning of accomplices lying in wait if she attempted to go back on their deal and try to apprehend Killian.

The real accomplices, of course, would be arriving slightly later in the form of Elsa’s forces, who couldn’t risk tipping their hand by following her too closely. Still, their presence meant that, in theory, even if Regina did have ideas of double-crossing Killian, all it would mean was that both Killian and Emma, rather than Emma alone, would be under arrest when Elsa’s men came for Regina.

That, at least, was the theory. And it was this, and only this, that kept Emma from panicking as they approached the ruins of Granny’s, their designated meeting place. Enough of the original structure remained to provide some cover to anyone who wished to use it, and Emma was surprised when Regina and several guards appeared from behind one of the larger remaining portions of the back wall.

“Your Majesty,” greeted Killian, his voice betraying nothing as he tightened his grip on Emma. “I’ll see the money first, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Regina, her usual smirk fixed firmly in place. And then, when two of her guards had almost reached Emma and Killian, holding what looked like a heavy bag between them, she added, almost casually,

“Seize them both.”

If Killian had been alone, Emma believed, he could have gotten away, even then. But he was holding Emma, her arms bound behind her, and the seconds he took to slash through the rope were enough for Regina’s men to block any escape.

 _It’s OK,_ she reminded herself as soldiers tied each of them to separate posts. _We’re OK. We knew this was a possibility._ Escaping would have been exactly the _wrong_ thing to do. Help was coming. Their part in this had never been more than buying Elsa’s forces some time.

As much as she knew it was an act, Emma allowed the bored unconcern in Killian’s voice to soothe her as he said, “Do you _really_ want to test me, love? I warned you what was going to happen if you tried anything. Or have you forgotten the last time you had me in chains?

“Oh, save it, Hook” sneered Regina. “That was before.” She walked right up to him, putting her hand on his cheek in what might have looked to an outsider like a gesture of intimacy, and then leaned in, stage-whispering in his ear so that there was no chance of Emma missing what she had to say. “Word on the street is you’ve gone soft.” The hand that wasn’t at Killian’s face drifted down below his belt and squeezed, leaving his body trying reflexively to double-over as much as the bindings would allow. Putting some distance between them, Regina continued, “You wouldn’t risk her. And _she_ wouldn’t risk anyone. Not after getting that sweet old lady killed. No one in your family ever did have the stomach for a real fight, dear,” she added, addressing Emma directly for the first time.

“Leave us,” she commanded the waiting soldiers. “Guard the perimeter. Make sure no one disturbs us. I want some _privacy_ for what comes next.”

Emma’s mind raced. This was _not_ part of the plan. Arrogant as she was, why would Regina risk being alone with them? What could she possibly have to say to them that couldn’t be said in front of her men?

But that, Emma realized, with a mounting sense of dread, wasn’t the right question. It wasn’t a matter of what she was going to say. It was a matter of what she was going to _do._  

As many atrocities as she had committed, Regina had always maintained a sliver of plausible deniability. She wouldn’t execute an enemy without at least a farce of a trial. Not in front of witnesses.

 _She wouldn’t,_ Emma thought desperately. _She would want to make a show of it_ , _parade him through the streets._ But then she remembered Killian’s bandit-logic. He had thought Regina would believe him because he had increased Emma’s price, deprived the Queen of one bargaining chip to raise the value of another. But Killian hadn’t gone far enough, hadn’t gotten used to considering his own worth in his devil’s arithmetic. 

Killian had increased Emma’s value, and lowered his own. With Emma in her hands, Regina had ammunition for all the spectacle she craved. Maybe enough not to be fussy about how she eliminated a long-standing thorn in her side.

Confirming Emma’s worst fears, as soon as the soldiers had retreated far enough into the distance, Regina picked up Killian's gun from where her guards had left it after disarming him. 

“I don’t normally like to get my hands dirty,” she gloated. “But I suppose I can make an exception. You always had to know it was going to end this way, Hook.”

He didn’t bother with a retort. Ignoring Regina entirely, he kept his eyes on Emma’s. “Emma,” he said, his voice low but steady, “I love you.”

Until that moment, some part of Emma had still believed that he had one more trick up his sleeve. Now she knew past all hope that he didn’t. Killian was saying goodbye.

 _Come on, Elsa_. They must be close. If Regina decided to preen for just a little longer…

But there was no time. Regina walked toward Emma, who, in the absence of anything else she could think of to do, started working her hands frantically against the ropes. Maybe it was just her desperation, but she thought she could feel some give in them as she tried to produce friction where she had been tied, sitting, at the foot of what she thought had once been a part of the bar. Her hand brushed against something hard, half buried in the mix of dirt and wood and ash. Could it be…?

The Queen crouched down so that she and Emma were at eye-level. “Aren’t you going to answer him?” she taunted. “Here,” she said, reaching her hand out and removing the gag from Emma’s mouth. “Never let it be said that I don’t have a sentimental side.” 

“Please Regina,” said Emma, her voice trembling. “Please.”

Regina’s smirk only widened. “No magic words here,” she said, and stood up, making as if to turn back toward Killian. “You’re wasting your breath.”

But Emma hadn’t been pleading for Killian’s life.

As soon as Regina was no longer facing her, Emma jerked her hands, freeing them from the loosened rope, and grabbed for the gun, probably the one that Granny had kept for herself after the first attack on the inn. Trying to keep her aim steady, she pulled the trigger, firing three rounds into Regina’s retreating back.

Her body toppled, and Emma was left looking into Killian’s stunned face, the Evil Queen lying dead between them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my initial plans for this story, Killian was going to be the one who killed Regina, in order to save Emma. But a few chapters in, I realized that of course it had to be the other way around, both for logical reasons -- Regina needs Emma alive -- and thematic ones.


	13. The Day After

Killian had been prepared to die.

He hadn’t wanted to, of course. Especially not now, when he had just begun to believe that the two of them might have some sort of a future together after all. But Regina had been right. He had always known it would end this way.

Maybe not precisely like this, shot by Regina while tied to a shard of a burned-out inn. But violently and, more likely or not, by this woman’s hand. He would be dragged before a cheering crowd as the Queen gave the order to the executioner or pushed out an open window just before he could escape through it. He would wake to an assassin by his bed, or perhaps not wake at all. But whenever and however it came, it was coming. One day, his luck would run out, and that would be it.

Since meeting Emma, Killian had sometimes considered the possibility that he would survive. These weren’t happy stories either. Maybe he did something even she couldn’t forgive, and lost what he had never deserved to win. Maybe she forgave him everything, always, but finally realized that the world wouldn’t, and parted tearfully from him as he sought out some far off refuge. Maybe she refused to leave, and he slipped away in the night to spare her a sacrifice he couldn’t allow her to make. All of the scenarios ended the same way: alone, someplace where no one had ever heard of Killian Jones, or Captain Hook, or Robin Hood.

When she had demanded asylum from Elsa, he had for the first time allowed himself to imagine something else: the one chance in a thousand that they really made it, found an exile gentle enough that it wouldn’t be a crime to share it with her.

But that had been a fantasy. As soon as Regina had ordered her men to leave them, he had known. This was one of the other versions of the story.

It wasn’t the worst way he could have died. Elsa’s men would be there soon. Regina’s government would fall; Emma would be safe, and he would have played his part in securing both outcomes. In some ways, maybe it was even better, more right than any of the alternatives could have been. He knew by now that Emma’s grief for him would be deep and long-lasting, and he hated the thought of causing her pain. But it could never have worked between them, not really. When the sun rose, they would be living in a new world, and he could think of no one better than Emma Nolan to help shape it into something better. But she couldn’t do it with Killian at her side. He had forfeited that right long ago. She had a life to live, without him.

His death, then and there, would have been fitting, sad and sweet as so many of the best stories had always been. But that wasn’t how things had turned out.

If either of them was going to kill Regina, it should have been Killian, who could have done it without a qualm. There were many crimes hanging heavy on his conscience; this wouldn’t have been one of them. It should never have been Emma, Emma who had made him remove the bullets from his gun, who had approached theft as a variety of philanthropy, who had wanted to be a different kind of hero. She should never have had to do this.

But she had, and not for the kingdom; Elsa’s men would have come soon enough for that. She had done it to save Killian.

And now he had to save her. She was still standing, frozen, the gun hanging aimlessly from her hand. She couldn’t be found like this, and they didn’t have much time.

“Emma. _Emma_. You did it. We’re safe. But we have to go. You have to free me.”

She moved toward him almost mechanically. It was only when she reached to untie his wrists that she seemed to realize she was still holding the gun, and dropped it with a start. Fortunately, the ropes were loose enough that the trembling of her hands didn’t stop her from making short work of the bindings.

Killian picked up the gun from where she had let it fall. He thought briefly of retrieving his own, but that would have meant moving Regina’s body, and he didn’t want to force Emma to go anywhere near it. Or, for that matter, to ask her to hold another gun. One weapon between the two of them would have to serve.

Having been part of the planning, he knew where Elsa’s forces would be coming from, and led Emma in the opposite direction. He had no distinct idea, at the moment, beyond putting as much distance as possible between themselves and Granny’s. Later, they could make for one of his hideouts and figure out where to go from there.

But they were barely out of sight of the inn when they encountered a lone figure before them: Elsa, dressed in her usual blue, her cape unfurled behind her, waving slightly in the February wind.

He stopped out of pure surprise. Almost immediately, he realized that, under the circumstances, it might have been best for them to keep running. He was just about to tug Emma’s hand to urge her forward when Elsa asked, very calmly, “So she’s dead, then?”

Immediately wary, Killian released Emma’s hand, putting his own on the holster of his gun. He didn’t want to hurt Elsa, but if she made a move against Emma, he wouldn’t hesitate. Something wasn’t right here. How had Elsa known? Why didn’t she sound more surprised?

Come to think of it, things had been wrong even before then. Elsa’s troops should have already made it to Granny’s by the time Emma had killed Regina, and certainly by the time Emma and Killian had fled. And it had been convenient, hadn’t it, that Regina’s handpicked guard had tied Emma so inexpertly that she had been able to free herself.

Maybe it was luck. Killian didn’t believe it. “You set us up,” he said angrily. “You knew she was going to double-cross me. You _wanted_ her dead. Just as long as you didn’t have to do it yourself.”

“I didn’t _know,_ ” replied Elsa with the same icy calm. “When we first sent the note, I did think that maybe she would go for it. But yes, my latest intelligence had suggested she was planning something else. I saw an opening, and I took it. You would have done the same.

He might have, once, and not so long ago, either. But Killian hadn’t forgiven himself, and he wasn’t forgiving her. “You used us,” he said. “You’re as bad as Regina.”

Her gaze dropped, and then turned briefly to Emma, whose continued silence seemed to unnerve her. “I told you days ago,” she said. “It was one life against the good of a kingdom. If she had lived, she would have been a distraction, a threat. And Arthur and I can’t build a new world with hands steeped in her blood.”

Her once confident tone had become almost pleading. “If it hadn’t worked, if Regina had killed you first, my men would have gotten there eventually, just as we had planned. Miss Nolan was never in any danger. Just you. It was an acceptable risk. I knew you could manage it. You must have felt right away that those ropes wouldn’t hold you.”

For a moment, Killian was confused. When it finally registered, he couldn't believe he hadn't seen it at once.

Elsa believed that _Killian_ had killed Regina. _Of course_ she did. Two of Regina’s guards must have been Elsa’s plants; one for Killian, one for Emma. But Emma had been the afterthought; it was Killian whom Elsa had been expecting to slip his bonds.

Only Elsa’s man had forgotten to account for one crucial detail. Killian would have been able to escape that knot – if he had had two good hands. His hook had many advantages, but dexterity was not among them.

With the first realization came another. Elsa assumed that Killian had killed Regina. _Everyone_ would.  And Killian wanted to keep it that way. He only prayed that Emma didn’t choose that moment to break her silence. He needed to end this as quickly as possible.

“So I assume asylum is off the table?” he asked bitterly.

“I can’t,” confirmed Elsa. “Not now. But I came to meet you with a different offer. Tomorrow at nightfall, head for the docks where we met. You’ll see a fishing boat. The captain, Kristoff, is a friend. His boat isn’t made for long trips, and it won’t be safe to move you for some time. But you can hide there, and when I can, I’ll arrange you passage to somewhere else. For both of you, if you wish.”

“I’ll think about it,” Killian said shortly. It might be his best option, but he wasn’t deciding anything until he had a chance to talk to Emma. “In the meantime, I suggest you take your clean hands somewhere else.”

Not waiting to see if she would follow his advice, he and Emma walked further into the forest, leaving Elsa behind.

*****

Killian eventually led them to one of his more distant hideaways, far enough away from most of the activity in the forest that he hadn’t had to use it in some time. It had an unpleasant musty smell, and was totally bare of furniture. Killian sat himself and Emma leaning against one of the walls. He noticed that she was shivering, despite her heavy coat, and covered her with his own.

“Emma,” he began, “I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now. But you have to remember, you didn’t have a choice. She was about to kill me. You have nothing to feel guilty about.”

“That’s just it,” she finally said. “I don’t.” She looked him full in the face for the first time since the moment their eyes had met over Regina’s body. “I just killed a woman. And yes,” she added, anticipating the objection, “she was a really terrible woman. But still a person. And I killed her. But if I could go back there, again, I wouldn’t do anything different. It would be just the same, every time.”

“That’s normal,” said Killian, though he knew he was hardly the best judge. “You can wish you hadn’t had to do something without regretting that you did it. It doesn’t make you bad or evil or heartless.”

Apparently unable or unwilling to respond to this, Emma returned to more practical matters. “Do you think we can trust Elsa?”

She was still talking in terms of “we.” Killian was going to have to address that, and quickly.

“I think Elsa has proven pretty clearly that we can’t,” he replied. “But if you’re asking me if I believe she’s telling the truth, then yes, I do. _She_ feels guilty about what she’s done. This is her way of making amends. I think she was _disappointed_ when I didn’t accept right away.”

He steeled himself. “But there’s something else,” he said, taking her hands. “No one knows that you were the one who…”

Emma supplied the words he had stopped short of saying. “Killed Regina.”

“Yes,” he said. “And no one ever has to.”

She dropped his hands, springing up off the floor. “You want me to sell you out?”

Killian rose to face her. “Don’t you see, it doesn’t _matter_ ,” he said. “Not for me. Arendelle was a pipe dream. I was always going to have to leave. But you still have a chance at a real life. This is the only way. I can’t risk you. If the truth came out, who knows what a court would decide? If it were self-defense, maybe –“

“She was about to kill an innocent --”

“Not an innocent,” he reminded her. “A known thief and cutthroat.”

“That didn’t give her the right--”

“Maybe not. But I’m not willing to trust some judge to appreciate the nuances. Especially when politics enter the picture.”

“I chose this,” insisted Emma. “I knew what I was risking.”

“You chose me,” said Killian. He placed his hand back on her shoulder. He couldn’t leave her thinking this was a rejection. “And I thank God for it every day. But I won’t let you suffer for my crimes.”

“And I won’t let you suffer for mine”

“That wasn’t a crime,” he said firmly. “And I won’t be around to answer for it. I’m not asking you to denounce me in open court. I’m asking you to let me do this last thing for you. The last, best thing I can do. Let me leave. Let me give you the life you deserve.”

“It isn’t about what I _deserve_. Or what you do.” She stroked her hand down his left arm, ending by entwining it in his hook. He loved that about her; the way she had treated it, from the beginning, as just one more part of him to be touched and accepted and embraced. “I love you. There is no other life anymore. Not one that I want.”

She leaned up to kiss him, and he couldn’t help but respond. When they broke apart, she continued, “I’m going with you. And not as some weird punishment for what I did, if that's what you're thinking. I’ve been planning this for months.”

She reached into a pocket in her coat, and pulled out two small booklets, passing them to Killian. They were passports with their pictures on them, made out to Leah Cassidy and Colin Jones.

“I was never letting you go alone,” she said.

And he knew he couldn’t deny her any longer, even if acceptance felt so much like selfishness. He drew her back into his arms.

“Together, then,” he said.

“You won’t ask me to leave again?”

“Never.”

“Then there’s one more thing I want to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Marry you. Today.”

*****

Two hours later, they had made their way back to the more populated area of the forest and stopped at the door of a cottage that Killian recognized, though he had never had occasion to enter it. He was unsurprised when his knock went unanswered.

“Tuck!” he shouted through the door. “Get out here or I’ll smash the window!"

After a few moments, the door opened. Tuck’s massive body filled the entire entranceway, and more, but he stepped aside meekly as Killian pushed his way through, Emma trailing behind him.

“Are you actually a priest?” Killian demanded.

“Of course,” said Tuck, who had the nerve to sound offended. “I may not be currently ensconced in the bosom of Mother Church, but --”

“Great,” interrupted Emma. “Then you can perform the wedding.”

Tuck looked between the two of them. “Do you have a license?”

Killian rolled his eyes. “You’re a bit behind the times, mate,” he said. “I have a feeling the government’s going to have to be a little more relaxed about the formalities, for a while. Get me a piece of paper.”

When the Friar complied, he, Killian and Emma sat down and, within a few minutes, had produced a reasonable facsimile of what they thought a marriage license should look like, dated and signed with all three of their names.

Tuck may have been a drunk and a pimp, but he knew his way around the marriage service. The only difficulty arose when the time came for the exchange of rings. Emma opened her mouth to tell him they didn’t have any, but Killian put his forefinger to her lips to silence her. Slowly, he pullled off the chain he wore around his neck, on which he had hung the last of the rings he had stolen from Emma seven months ago. He had never pawned it, saving it instead for an emergency.

“I know it’s bad form to give you your own ring back,” he said as he placed it on her finger. “But I thought under the circumstances, we could count it as an exchange.”

And so, in the dingy cabin of a disgraced priest, Killian and Emma took each other for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, till death should part them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a note about Elsa. Despite the rather treacherous turn I had her take here, I want to clarify that I don't actually hate the character, either in canon (Frozen or Once) or in this story.
> 
> Elsa behaved badly, and knows it. But her actions were more Machiavellian than evil, and only look as terrible as they do because we're getting this story from Emma and Killian's perspective rather than from hers. To Elsa, Killian is just a criminal who happens to be on her side, whose death really would be a pretty small price to pay for taking out a threat, if it came to that, and who certainly doesn't deserve asylum. She was willing to be a hypocrite in putting her own sister's life ahead of the lives of many others; she isn't willing to do the same for Killian or even Emma. 
> 
> What makes her actions sketchier, of course, is that she's not operating under a fully fair utilitarian calculus; she isn't weighing one life against many (which can be problematic in its own right), but using that kind of logic to justify a choice -setting up Killian in preference to ordering her own men to kill Regina-- that is politically expedient for her. And convincing yourself that your political future is synonymous with the good of the many is a very, very ethically dicey for a politician to do. Again, however, it is certainly more complicated than Elsa being a rotten person; I don't think she is one. I actually see this version of Elsa as a foil for Emma; both of them began as idealists and then had to confront reality, sometimes in the form of compromising their morals, except Elsa's been doing it for longer, and is in a much more powerful (and therefore potentially corrupting) position. Elsa may never have killed - but she's likely crossed lines that Emma hasn't, even before this incident, and it has made her harder and more cynical.


	14. Sacrifice

It was an unusual honeymoon. 

Killian supposed it was common enough for newlyweds to spend most of their time in the bedroom, but not, normally, because they almost literally couldn’t go anywhere else. Kristoff was, they were relieved to find, a friendly and eminently unflappable presence who likely would have been cheerfully willing to supply their needs even if he weren’t under orders from Elsa to do so. Given the manner in which Killian had been long accustomed to fulfilling most of his – and more recently Emma’s – requirements, it was almost incredible to him that when they wanted clothes or food or books, they could simply _ask_ the other man, and he would walk into an ordinary store with a legitimate credit card and return with it. But it meant that there wasn’t really any reason for Killian to take the risk of emerging from the small cabin below-decks that had become their quarters. His, he reminded himself, still marveling over it, and his _wife_ ’s.

Sometimes, when Kristoff took the boat out after dark, Killian and Emma did venture above. While Emma had been sailing before, it was a new experience for Killian, who had begun learning some of the basics of how to do it himself from Kristoff. In another life, he remarked to Emma one day, he thought he could have enjoyed being a sailor, defying wind and weather as he set a course through the open seas. 

“Maybe you still can be,” she said, and he realized she was right. One of their favorite pastimes had become musing about where they would wind up and how they might live there. Knowing that the choice of the former, at least, would ultimately depend on where Elsa and her contacts could get them, they couldn’t really plan in earnest, lending a comfortable unreality to their discussions. All it took was picking a spot on a map, and a picture of a life could unfold before them. Avalon, Avalor, Avonlea – every name on the list another story, another world. Perhaps Killian could find work on a fishing boat on some tropical island, coming home each day to Emma with his portion of the day’s catch. Maybe Emma would teach again, English classes for locals dreaming of their own ventures into the wider world. Wherever it was, they would learn a new language, a new geography together, making it their home as they had every place they had been, from the shack in the forest to the coastal mansion.

Two weeks, they had given themselves. Two weeks before they would think about what was happening outside this little boat. Emma might not have been torn up with guilt over what she had done to Regina, but neither, Killian thought, would she ever be wholly comfortable with it, and she wasn’t ready to confront the fallout in the court of public opinion. While practically speaking, both Killian’s and Emma’s reputations had ceased to matter as soon as they had decided to flee, Emma was still tied enough to the world she had grown up in to care what stories were being told about her and, perhaps even more than that, about Killian. 

Not that their stories could now be separated. Had Emma not met up with Killian in Sherwood – provided she had managed to avoid capture, of course – no one but Regina loyalists like that Deville woman would have cause to charge her with anything much worse than an excess of idealism. Joining up with Captain Hook was a different matter. As long as they were in Sherwood, where the lines were murky and Hook had found a measure of acceptance even before Emma had arrived, it hadn’t been a problem. Elsewhere, it would be.

Perhaps it was a feeble justification, but this was part of the reason that Killian could accept having agreed to tie her fate, too, so inextricably to his own. Had she acquiesced in his initial plan, he still believed she could have returned home without real legal risk; even if all (with one, obvious exception) were known, she hadn’t really _done_ anything other than benefit from his own thefts and kidnap a child _back_ from the woman who had stolen her away in the first place. Surely, they wouldn’t go after her for interfering with Ruby’s arrest, under the circumstances, and it would be hard to charge her with aiding and abetting a fugitive when Emma herself had been wanted for the whole of her relationship with Killian. If they really wanted to find a pretext to punish her, he supposed there was always the theft of the yellow bug, but if this Arthur were even half the political animal that Elsa was, he would leave well enough alone.

Even so, things would have been tense. At best, people would look charitably at her as a child blinded by love, a clemency Emma wouldn’t have appreciated, and wouldn’t have let stand; even if she had resigned herself to letting everyone think that Killian had been the one to kill Regina, he knew Emma too well to think she would have been willing to deny him completely. She would have defended him, privately if not publicly, the problem being, as it always was, that they weren’t _all_ lies. If he had limited himself to stealing from Regina, if he hadn’t killed those guards, if it had all been a sham, even if she couldn’t have convinced everyone, at least the righteousness of her position would have been clear. As it was…

When she had mentioned Aurora Briars in her account of the night of Regina’s party, he had had to confess to her that he had once left the woman and her husband hogtied in their own kitchen when they had come home unexpectedly while he was cleaning out their safe. 

Killian knew that he had become a better man, that he could never, perhaps, have been defined completely by the worst things he had done. But he had done them, and while Emma had chosen to accept him in spite of it, there was no reason anyone else should do so, or consider Emma’s support of him anything other than rank and deluded apologism. In a way, it had already been too late for her, even if he had left.

Avoiding the news, instructing Kristoff not to keep them informed of anything short of an active threat to their safety, had been an indulgence they granted themselves. But it couldn’t last. Eventually they let him give them the stack of papers he had been saving for them. 

On balance, it was a lot better than it could have been. Killian had feared that Elsa was going to throw him under the bus entirely, suggesting that he really had been planning to sell Emma to Regina. Practically irrelevant as it might have been, even Killian hadn’t liked to think of that particular sin being laid at his door. Elsa, however, had stayed closer to the truth than he had expected, whether out of conscience or because she thought she couldn’t credibly get away with more, Killian couldn’t have said. If nothing else, he doubted Anna would have kept quiet.

Predictably, Elsa had downplayed her own connection to Killian, claiming to have been approached by Emma and Emma alone, whom she credited with having “offered” to serve as bait in a distraction. She maintained that there had, as far as she knew, been no plans on anyone’s part to do anything but capture Regina, and volunteered that her “sources inside Miss Mills’s guard indicated that the Queen had apprehended both Miss Nolan and Mr. Jones, and evidently intended to summarily execute Mr. Jones. I can only assume,” she had added, “that Mr. Jones managed to overpower Miss Mills himself before she could effect her intentions.”

_The Prime Minister said she had no knowledge of the current whereabouts of either Miss Nolan or Mr. Jones,_ the article continued. _When asked if she believed Miss Nolan might be in danger from the infamous criminal, she said that she had no reason to believe so. Madam Elsa repeatedly refused requests to speculate on the nature of the relationship between the rebellious scion of the Nolan family and the notorious Mr. Jones, more commonly known by his alias, Captain Hook, but the two are rumored to have become acquainted shortly after Miss Nolan fled from home last year…_

Elsa may have refused to speculate; others were less circumspect. The press, freed from years of suppression, had done their due diligence on both Emma and Killian, whose true identity – including his time in Regina’s service and the circumstances of Liam’s death – had suddenly become a matter of common knowledge. Breathless recaps of his career as a bandit were splashed across the pages of every paper, though, in a turn that pleased Emma more than it did Killian, so too did the fact that Regina had been responsible for many of the worst crimes attributed to him. Emma, of course, had been more of a known quantity before now, but amidst extracts from her blog and pointless, information-free interviews with old classmates and neighbors, reports from Sherwood had also begun to trickle out. Most of the forest-dwellers, not yet ready to trust to the recent political changes, had apparently remained tight-lipped and refused, almost to a man, to allow themselves to be quoted by name. Still, they had said enough for reporters to gather than Emma had been volunteering her time as a teacher among the roughs and vagabonds of Sherwood – and that she and Killian had been “inseparable.”

In all, then it was better than they had expected – with one exception. Meeting only token resistance from scattered loyalists, Arthur and his people had taken control of the government by right of an election he had won within the community of exiles that had long lived in Arendelle. He had scheduled a regular election for the following year; in the meantime, having been doggedly preparing for a return during their many years abroad, his government was quickly repairing the tattered institutions of their once-democratic system. Trouble had arisen, however, over what to do with those who had been most complicit in Regina’s crimes, with many of those who had lived under her calling for vengeance.

In the end, Arthur had announced a blanket amnesty for, not only crimes committed by Regina’s forces, but for _anyone_ who had committed crimes under Regina’s rule. Existing convictions would be reviewed; new cases would not be pursued at all. It was time to move forward, not look back, he said, adding that given the rampant corruption that had pervaded all levels of Regina’s law enforcement, it would be too difficult to ensure fair trials in any case.

Everyone, therefore, would be given a blank slate – for crimes committed, apparently, up until the precise moment that Emma had raised her gun. When asked about whether the amnesty meant that Captain Hook would face no charges over the killing of Regina, Arthur had vowed that that was one crime that he would make it his business to investigate. “We will and must be a nation of laws,” he intoned. “That was not the last crime of Regina’s era, but the first of ours. And we cannot make a new world with hands steeped in her blood.”

Apparently, Killian thought wryly as he recognized Elsa’s own words to him, Arthur and the Prime Minister were close. What was the nature of _their_ relationship, he wondered?

But of course, there were more serious implications as well. Neither Killian nor Emma could miss the terrible irony: for all that he had done, the only crime that Killian could now be held accountable for was the one Emma had committed.

“I would have been dead,” he reminded her to forestall the inevitable wave of guilt. “Hard to enjoy an amnesty with a bullet through your heart.”

Still, it stung. _Emma_ wasn’t to blame, but if Elsa hadn’t betrayed them, he would have been a free man.

Emma, once the initial shock had passed, viewed the news from a different angle. “Couldn’t this still change things? Legally, I mean? With all of the other charges gone – and this one _was_ justified.” 

“It’s still too much of a risk,” Killian answered. “I can’t _technically_ be charged with anything else, but I have a feeling no judge wants to be the one who let Captain Hook off scot-free after getting hold of him.”

Emma, after a pause, made the obvious point. “It doesn’t have to be you. I know what we agreed, but the circumstances are different, now…”

“Not different enough. You’d have a better chance,” he conceded, “but at the end of the day, even if they believe everything, you’ll be admitting to having killed a Queen to save a criminal. A criminal,” he added, “that you then proceeded to marry. Like it or not, love, you’re compromised.”

Trying to soften his words, he ended with raising one more hopeful possibility. “When we’re safely away, we can look into things. You can get in touch with your parents, talk to a lawyer. If there were a real chance, maybe…” He trailed off. He couldn’t even pretend that he would ever risk Emma’s freedom on a chance.

“I know it’s harder, knowing how close we came,” he said finally. “But it doesn’t really change things. We’re no worse off than we were yesterday.”

They had let the world back in, and it had confirmed their reticence to do so earlier. But Killian wasn’t just trying to comfort Emma with his words. If they kept to the plan, he reminded himself, nothing that happened outside this boat could be very important to them.

*****

In the end, Killian was right. It wasn’t anything outside the boat that changed things for them. It was something that happened within.

A few weeks later, Killian came down from the deck, where he had been sailing with Kristoff, to find Emma waiting up for him. Unusually, she hadn’t accompanied him, saying she was tired and wanted to go to bed early. Killian and Kristoff had stayed out late, and he had expected Emma to be long asleep by the time he returned.

 “Trouble sleeping?” he asked.

“I didn’t try,” she admitted. She made a space for him beside her on the bed. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I was trying to think of a good way to say it, but…”

She took hold of his hand and hook. “Killian, I’m pregnant.”

*****

This time, Killian only gave himself a day to pretend. One day where he could enjoy this.

“I know it’s not the best timing,” Emma had said when he remained speechless after her declaration. 

“We’ll manage,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. He gently pushed her onto her back, and, raising her shirt slightly, placed a kiss on her abdomen for good measure. It was still almost flat, making it hard to believe that a child was in there, _their_ child.

They had talked about it, in some of their dreamy visions of exotic futures. But it had always been a far-off possibility, part of the unreality of these scenes.

This was real. “We’ll have to find a hospital,” said Killian, as the most manageable problem to tackle. He couldn’t imagine they would still be lingering in this boat in nine months – or was it eight, by now, or only seven - but who knew where they would wind up?

“Most places have hospitals,” said Emma. “And if not, women have been doing this on their own for a long time.”

Yes, and too many had died doing it, too, though Killian wasn’t about to say it. Instead, he reached for the atlas lying at the side of the bed. He closed his eyes, opening the book and choosing a random spot on the page. When he opened them, his finger was lying on the image of an island off the Caprican coast. “Gemenon,” he read. “Sounds like a fine place to raise a child.”

That was how they spent the rest of the night, and parts of the day after. Playing the old game, spinning out new stories of the lives they would live. All three of them, now, Emma and Killian and a child who would never have to make the terrible choices that both of its parents, in their different ways, had done. Killian spoke of being a better father than his own had been, and Emma of her fear that her parents might never know her child. But mostly, they avoided such serious topics, preferring to dream for a little longer.

The next evening, Emma did fall asleep early, having spent most of the previous night awake. When he was sure she was soundly asleep, Killian knew it was time. 

He spent several minutes just watching her as she slept. Finally, he kissed her cheek, a selfish part of him hoping that it would wake her, giving him a reason to wait just a little longer. But she only shifted slightly, changing position in such a way that more of her stomach was exposed. He wished he could have felt the baby move inside her, just once.

He was doing this for them, he told himself for what seemed like the thousandth time since the morning. Though he and Emma had never dwelled on it, of course there had always been some risk that the plan would go wrong and they would wind up arrested. He imagined Emma forced to give birth in some prison infirmary, or worse, dying in childbirth in a distant land. He thought of how ready she had been, in spite of all that dreaming, to jump at the first thing that had seemed like it might give them the hope of staying. She had chosen, all the same, and he respected it – but their child hadn’t. Maybe he or she wouldn’t have been so ready to give up everything that this land could offer for a place lawless or undeveloped enough that extradition treaties couldn’t touch them there. 

Killian had vowed to be a better father than his own. But it wouldn’t be by staying. He forced himself to leave the room, knocking on the door of Kristoff’s cabin.

“There’s something I need to do on shore,” said Killian when he answered. “I’m hoping to be back before Emma wakes, but if not – she might try to follow me, and it wouldn’t be safe. Take the boat out for a while as soon as I’m gone.”

Kristoff wasn’t buying it. “You’re leaving her? _Now_?” It was obvious from his tone and emphasis that he had a fairly good idea of what had just changed between them. Seemingly realizing that Killian might not understand, he added, “Who did you think got her the pregnancy test?”

“I’m not leaving her; I’m leaving _for_ her,” Killian insisted. He didn’t have time for this. When the other man didn’t budge from where he was standing, Killian said, “Kristoff, I don’t want to do it, but you know full well I could knock you out and take my chances. All you would accomplish is putting Emma at more risk.”

After a little more argument, Kristoff conceded the point, and moments later, Killian was on dry land, turning his head for one last look as his path took him away from the boat that carried all in the world that now mattered to him.

***** 

Killian braced himself, looking up at the large house that Emma had grown up in. No, not looking at it, _casing_ it, he realized; it was by now instinct to him, confronted with a place like this, to assess vulnerabilities and plot out the likeliest sites of entry and exit. But he wouldn’t need such tactics tonight.

He walked down the path through the lawn and up the front steps. He was about to knock when he noticed the doorbell and pressed it. Rather than a buzzing sound, he could hear a gentle melody ringing through the house. It had scarcely finished when the door opened, revealing both David and, standing slightly behind him, Mary Margaret Nolan. 

Before they could say anything, Killian raised his arms above his head. He had left his hook at the boat, but there was no question of whether or not they would recognize him.

“Please,” he said. “It’s for Emma. Let me in.”

David stepped aside, exchanging a brief look with Mary Margaret. “Where is she?” he demanded as Killian walked over the threshold. “Don’t lower your hands,” he added, interrupting Killian’s movement to shut the door, which Mary Margaret instead stepped forward to close behind him.

“Emma’s fine,” Killian said at once, though he scarcely expected it to bring them much comfort. “And I’ve come here to tell you where she is, but there are things you need to know first.” He had promised himself on the way over to avoid stratagems, but holding back the information on Emma’s location was necessary. If he told them, they would be liable to leave right away, and while everything Emma had ever said about her parents convinced Killian he could trust them with her physical safety, he didn’t want her bearing the brunt of whatever their immediate reactions to her…circumstances might be. Sometimes, the people you loved could hurt you more deeply than your worst enemy. “There’s a gun in a holster at my waist. It’s the only weapon I’m carrying. Take it,” he urged, hoping it would buy him a little bit of trust.

Cautiously, keeping his eyes on Killian’s arms as he moved, David complied, unloading the gun as soon as it was in his hands. _Like father like daughter,_ thought Killian, although by now, he suspected, Emma wouldn’t have deprived herself of the potential advantage so quickly. Nothing Emma had told him about David Nolan had given Killian cause to think that the man would have any reason to know how to handle a gun, but the ease with which he had removed the cartridge suggested otherwise. Not for the first time, Killian wondered exactly what kinds of games the Nolans, acquiescent as they had seemed, might have been playing during Regina’s reign.

“Let’s sit down,” said Mary Margaret in what was plainly her own way of defusing the situation. She and David sat on one side of the kitchen table, leaving Killian to the chair opposite. Their kitchen, he couldn’t help noticing, was probably as big as at least the smallest of the cabins he and Emma had stayed in in Sherwood. “Now will you _please_ tell me where my daughter is?”

Killian sighed. It was harder to resist Mary Margaret than David. “That’s the first thing you have to understand,” he said. “She’s not just your daughter anymore. She’s my wife.”

Mary Margaret gasped. David made as if to rise, and only stopped at his wife’s warning hand on his arm.

“You manipulated her, then” he shot out. “You _forced_ her.”

This was exactly the kind of reaction Killian didn’t want Emma to hear. He couldn’t help the anger, and struggled to keep his voice calm. Apart from everything else, what David was saying was illogical; men like Hook didn’t force women to _marry_ them. “If I did, why would I be here now?”

Mary Margaret, presumably trained by years of navigating dealings with Regina, took a more diplomatic approach. “Emma is very young, and she was all alone. We had heard that the two of you had gotten…close. I’m sure she cares for you. We’re just saying she might have been… _confused_.” 

”Did she seem confused when she saved Grace from under the Queen’s nose?” Killian retorted. “You know her better than that.”

After a long pause, Mary Margaret finally asked, “Then why _are_ you here?”

This was it. If he had thought they would react poorly to hearing that they were married…. "We had been planning on running away together,” he said. “Elsa was going to help us. Get us abroad.  But now….” He decided to get it out quickly, hoping to talk through their stunned reactions. “She’s pregnant. Emma’s pregnant, and she still wants to go, but I can’t-" 

“Can’t stick around for the hard part?” David interrupted. “Came here to leave us to clean up the mess?”

“David!” admonished Mary Margaret, immediately realizing he had gone too far.

Killian didn’t try as hard to control himself this time, permitting his voice to assume Hook’s quiet menace. “If you ever,” he said, “refer to my child as a _mess_ again, if you even give a sign that you’re _thinking_ it, wherever I am, I’ll find a way to make sure you never come near either one of them.” He appealed to Mary Margaret, immediately moderating his tone. “I’m giving myself up to the police. Emma doesn’t know I’ve gone. She would never have let me but I can’t risk…”

He had thought of holding this part of it back, but Emma would tell them the truth, and they had to be prepared for it. “I didn’t kill Regina,” he said, for what would be the first and last time. “Emma did.”

“She would _never_ -”

“It was to save me,” he said, cutting David off. “Regina was about to kill me, and she got free.” He turned again to Mary Margaret. “Wouldn’t you have done it for him?”

As they absorbed this, he pressed on. “I have no reason to lie to you. I tried to convince her to let me cover for her before, leave on my own and let people keep thinking what they wanted, but she wouldn’t. I don’t think she’ll contradict me once I’ve confessed, not with the baby to think of, but you have to make sure.” His voice started to break, and he couldn’t even bring himself to be embarrassed. “I need to know they’ll be safe. It’s the only thing I can give them.”

Mary Margaret reached across the table, putting her hand, somewhat tentatively, on Killian’s and waiting for him to look at her directly. “They’ll be safe,” she promised softly. “We’ll help Emma through this. Love the baby as much as we did her. And Killian -” the name sounded unnatural on her lips, the difficulty of mentally shifting from Hook to Killian evident in her slight hesitation – “I do know my daughter, and I trust her. I’m not going to try to make her forget you. And-” she glanced at David as if daring him to contradict her - “we’re going to help you too, if we can. Lawyers, arranging visits. It will…take some getting used to, but you’re part of this family, now.”

It was exactly what he had needed to hear. There was no scenario in which this was ever going to be anything but terrible for Emma, but she would be okay. “There’s a fishing boat named _The Jewel_ that docks at Raven’s Eye. That’s where you’ll find Emma.”

All of them moved to go, Killian in the lead. He was about to leave, when David put a hand on his arm to stop him. “You do know,” he said quietly, “That there’s a chance they’re not going to let you surrender.”

He had thought of it. “Then you’ll have to help her through that, too,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, he was again walking through a doorway with his arms in the air.

“My name is Killian Jones,” he announced as several guns turned toward him. “And I’m here to turn myself in.”


	15. Surviving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is by far the angstiest chapter. Apologies, and continued promises that things actually will get better.

Emma had come to hate the sight of plexiglass.

She and Killian couldn’t have been more than a foot apart. Yet she couldn’t touch him through the barrier that separated them, couldn’t even hear him until he picked up the phone on his side of the divider.

“Swan. How are you?” he asked.

For the first few months, through the whole trial, really, it had been the other way around. For nearly two weeks, they hadn’t let her see or speak to him at all, and it had been a special kind of torture to have to wait for media updates to bring her any news of him. As, at first, no one had been willing to recognize Emma as next-of-kin, she hadn’t even been able to get confirmation of where he had been taken or – on that first, terrible day – that he hadn’t been shot on sight.

When she had finally been allowed to visit, then, the first thing she had needed was verbal confirmation that he was, at least physically, alive and well and coping. He had looked healthy enough, though it hurt her to see him without the hook, the left sleeve of his lime-green prison jumpsuit folded over slightly to fit the shortened arm. His face was uncertain, as if he might have been expecting anger from her, or maybe even worrying that she would say something to risk their cover. But the tone of her immediate, urgent, utterly inadequate “are you okay?” must have convinced him that it wasn’t going to be that kind of conversation.

“I’m fine,” he reassured her. “The warden, Nemo, is a good man. As for the accommodations – I’ve had worse. So have you.”

She could believe it. But, at least in her case, they had always been together. 

Many visits after that had started the same way. Was Killian okay? Was he being treated decently by the guards? Had any of the other prisoners given him trouble? Did he have enough money in his commissary account? But after a while, Emma had realized that he would never be able to give her the answer she really wanted. 

Killian _was_ okay, safer, actually, than he had been at any previous point during his adult life. Even if Nemo had been the type of man to turn a blind eye to a sadistic guard, Killian’s (presumed) identity as Regina’s killer was enough to have earned him a certain respect and gratitude among guards and inmates alike. Arthur’s amnesty meant that relatively few of Regina’s partisans had wound up in jail, and Killian’s reputation was enough to make people wary of challenging him. Once, sometime in the first month, Killian had shown up for a visit with a black eye, waving off Emma’s worry by telling her vaguely that he had “handled it.” This would not have been terribly reassuring, if not for the fact that Killian’s face had held more than a trace of his old smirk as he said it, leaving Emma with the strong impression that he was holding back out of discretion – they had no guarantee of privacy during these visits – rather than out of a desire to protect her. Whatever he had done, there had been no repeat of the injury since.

But none of this got at the central problem, which was simply that he was here at all. He was safe, and fed, and healthy, and a prisoner, and that was something that no amount of soothing answers could change.

So, gradually, Emma gave herself permission to focus on other things, things that might take him away, for at least the two hours she was allowed to see him each week, from this world of cells and bars and court dates and appeals. She told him about readjusting to life with her parents, about plans for finishing her degree, about the work she had already started doing helping with the _actual_ charitable foundation that the Nolans had established to help people whose lives had been disrupted by Regina’s reign. She told him about the surprise of opening the door one day to Ruby and Ashley, who had overcome their own lingering fears of leaving the forest – not to mention presenting themselves at the Nolan estate – for Emma’s sake. She updated him on the progress of the rebuilding of Granny’s, though she hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to go back for a first-hand look.

Above all, she talked with him about the baby, wanting him to feel as involved as he could under the circumstances. She described what it was like when she started to feel it kick and refused to look at the ultrasound photos until she could do so with him at their next visit. They went over names together, for both boys and girls, as Emma had decided that she didn’t want to know the sex until the baby was born. That decision, she didn’t explain to Killian. Though she knew how little sense it made, given that Killian wouldn’t be there for the birth, either, finding out without him there would make it too final: it would be the first milestone she had consciously undertaken without him, and if she could delay it just a little longer, she would do so. 

Not that not explaining it spared Killian his own acute awareness of all he would be missing. One day, Emma noted that the names they had been thinking of were all names of the dead: Liam or Henry for a boy, Alice – after Killian’s mother – for a girl.

“It would be sweet to honor someone, but doesn’t it seem kind of morbid?” said Emma. “Maybe we should go with something new.”

“I’m sure it will be perfect, whatever you choose,” said Killian, and Emma wasn’t sure if he even realized that he had left himself out of the equation.

Of course, they couldn’t talk about one of the subjects that preoccupied her. Even she and her parents, the only other two people with whom she could have discussed it, instinctively avoided referring to it directly as a secret too dangerous for articulation. Emma had been relieved to learn that they already knew the truth (“Killian told us _everything,_ ” her mother had said before they had even left the boat, giving her words, as she had done back on the night of Regina’s party, a significance Emma couldn’t miss), but they usually approached the topic only obliquely: reassurances that she had nothing to feel guilty over, references to what Killian had “done for them.”

If Killian had been worrying that she wasn’t going to go along with it, he needn’t have been. Emma knew what the moral answer here was: tell the truth, consequences be damned. What Killian had done was noble, and, she could grudgingly acknowledge, operated by the logic of a kind of karmic justice. There would have been something perverse in _Emma_ being the one, of the two of them, who wound up in jail. Still and all, the right thing, the virtuous thing, would have been for Emma to confess.

Virtue, however, wasn’t going to raise her child. If it came to it, there were any number of reasons why it made more sense for Emma than for Killian to be the one left with the baby. And even if there hadn’t been, once Killian had turned himself in, there was every possibility that Emma doing the same, with a very different story, might end in charges for both of them.

So she resigned herself to it. Not entirely; there were always appeals to be exhausted, and then the possibility of petitioning Arthur for a pardon. But in the meantime, this was their life. Short phone calls and twice-a-week visits and holding her hand up to the glass, as he did the same in parallel on the other side, as the closest they could come to a goodbye kiss.

And if nothing else _did_ work, it was all they had to look forward to for the next twenty years. 

*****

Emma didn’t think she could have gotten through it at all without her parents. She had expected some of it – their accompanying her to doctor’s visits, setting up a nursery, keeping the press at bay as much as possible, even the lack of any blame or recriminations. From the day she had first left home, she had never once doubted that her parents would forgive her, understanding, as she knew they did, the righteous anger that had driven her. 

What surprised her was their attitude toward Killian. Emma had worried that they would try to ignore, as much as possible, the awkward fact of their daughter’s marriage, or maybe even try to convince her that she was better off moving on with her life without him. But not only did they pay for an expensive lawyer to take his case, they broke months of steadfast public silence on everything related to Emma’s life with a joint statement supporting Killian: 

_The President has granted amnesty for any and all crimes committed during Regina’s reign. Our son-in-law is on trial for a single charge– the killing of Regina Mills – and we hope and trust that the court will evaluate that act, without prejudice, as the clear instance of self-defense that it was._

What Emma appreciated most, however, was their simple willingness to acknowledge that Killian was and would continue to be a part of Emma’s life. Even Ashley and Ruby, when they had come for the first time, had avoided mentioning Killian’s name until Emma herself brought him up, as if they thought she might have forgotten where he was and didn’t want to risk upsetting her with the reminder. Her mother, however, seemed to be making a point of referring to him casually as she would any other integral figure in their daily lives, peppering her conversations with phrases like “While you were out visiting Killian” and “after Killian calls.” She did this even when visitors were over, stubbornly refusing to take their sometimes obvious discomfort into account. Evidently, she had come to a decision: Emma’s comfort was all that mattered to her, and anyone who had a problem with it was welcome to stay home. 

Her father, try as he might to conceal it from Emma, was plainly having a harder time adjusting. Emma didn’t know exactly what he had said to Killian at their meeting, but it was clear from the reactions of both men that David hadn’t embraced the new member of the family with open arms. Yet it had been David who, after several days of administrative stonewalling over whether or not the relevant agencies would accept Emma and Killian’s homemade marriage license, had taken matters into his own hands. He went out one morning and called a few hours later instructing Emma and Mary Margaret to meet him at the office a notary public, where they arrived to find David sitting with Friar Tuck, ready and willing to sign an affidavit confirming that he had performed the wedding. Tuck’s relative cheer, along with Emma’s knowledge of his character, told her that her father must have paid him well enough that he would have sworn that he had married Leroy to Granny, if asked. But even if Tuck’s statement was only incidentally truthful, it had been enough to solve at least that problem.

Even more surprising than the extent of her parents’ support, however, had been the reappearance of Tink. Her parents had told her that Tink, after delivering Emma’s message with her typical surliness, had refused to accept any help from the Nolans at all. Mary Margaret had informed the younger woman, however, that she had used some of her contacts to book her a bed at a private rehab center, and that it would be held for her indefinitely. A month later, the facility had called to tell Mary Margaret that Tink had checked in. Privacy rules prohibited them from giving her any further updates, but she gathered from what they said that Tink had been in pretty bad shape when she arrived.

When she made her way back to the Nolans, sometime around the seventh month of Emma’s pregnancy, she looked better than Emma had ever seen her, though Emma decided not to comment on it. Changed or not, Tink was still Tink. 

“I’m here because I like Hook, not you,” she warned Emma, but there was no longer any bite to it. Her eyes flicked to Emma’s stomach. “Well, at least the kid’ll probably be cute.” That was about as congratulatory as Emma had expected Tink to be – or as congratulatory as she would have expected, had she been expecting to see her at all. Actually, it was more congratulatory than most people had been; given the circumstances, people hadn’t exactly treated Emma’s pregnancy as a reliable source of impending joy, and confined their comments to safe questions about how she was feeling or when she was due.

Tink, however, hadn’t come for idle chat. “I brought something for you,” she said, handing over a large manila folder. Emma opened it to find letters, over two dozen of them, all from members of the old Sherwood crowd. “I know sometimes a judge will accept letters from character references,” she explained, “and I figured it couldn’t hurt.” 

While Emma didn’t have much experience with the genre, she doubted very much that these were the types of letters judges were used to considering. Several of them, including Ruby’s, were barely literate, though much better than anything their authors could have produced a year ago. Most openly discussed illegal activities, and even those that were more circumspect wouldn’t have required much reading between the lines to figure out that the various forms of aid they were crediting Killian with couldn’t have been honestly acquired. A few of the writers had been savvy enough to refer to him as Killian – the Darlings and several of the other orphans, presumably under Wendy’s direction, had even gone with a more formal “Mr. Jones” – but the majority had simply called him Hook, as they always had. It had also become apparent, however, that more people than Killian had been aware of had had a reasonable idea of just who Robin Hood had been since long before the publicity after Regina’s death had allowed the rest to connect the dots. 

Killian’s lawyer had advised against sending them. Killian wasn’t on trial for anything but Regina’s murder, and if they couldn’t hide his past, they didn’t want to highlight it either. Emma and Killian, however, had in this case, and only this case, overruled her. Everyone knew that, whatever the official charges, this trial was also a referendum on Hook’s crimes. If the judge was going to be thinking about them anyway, he might as well be able to see the other side of it. It would give him a truer picture, at least, than any of the actual evidence presented at the trial.

Whether or not it had helped, Emma and Killian had been moved by the gesture. She had read each letter to him, and even made copies that she had sent to him through the prison mail. The only one that neither of them had read was Tink’s own, which had already been sealed in an individual envelope within the folder when she had given it to Emma. 

Of course, it hadn’t been enough. Maybe it had helped – a twenty-year sentence, with the possibility of parole in twelve, had been less than Killian could have gotten. But even if the judge had been scrupulous about limiting himself to the facts of the case at hand, it had only taken one conversation with the lawyer for Emma to realize that the self-defense argument was less iron-clad than she had hoped.

Not only had there been understandable suspicion that Killian had planned for precisely this outcome as revenge for Liam’s death, they had to contend with the indisputable fact that Regina had been shot in the back. While they had reversed every other aspect of the story, it simply wasn’t believable, based on what Elsa had already said, to claim that Killian had fired to stop Regina from killing Emma. Instead, the lawyer argued that, given that the Queen had made clear her intention to execute Killian, he had been justified in taking his opportunity when she turned away to taunt Emma, giving him time to grab the gun.

It was a plausible argument. But a door had been opened, and there was no closing it.

At home afterwards, Emma had broken their unspoken pact and talked openly about what she had done. Not to her mother, who would have been too ready to reassure, too quick to say the easy and hopeful thing, but to her father. She was lying on the bed in her childhood bedroom, and he had come to check on her on the pretext of bringing her a glass of water.

“If I had told everyone I had done it. Right after the amnesty. We would both be free right now, wouldn’t we?”

He entered the room, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Maybe.” His eyes drifted around the room, pausing for a moment on a framed picture that the three of them had taken on a vacation to the beach when Emma had been very young, and then on the hook that rested on Emma’s bedside table. “I don’t think it would have been twenty years,” he finally continued. “But in the end, I think someone was always going to have to pay for it.”

“Because of Arthur and Elsa? Because of politics?”

“Not entirely,” he said. “Though it didn’t help.” He moved up the bed slightly so that he could look at her more closely. “Arthur was right to pass the amnesty. But it couldn’t take away the feelings. Of anger, obviously, but also guilt. All of us did things we weren’t proud of under Regina. Even your mother. Even me. In the end, I think a lot of people were looking for a villain more than they were looking for a hero.”

“And Killian made a pretty good one,” Emma said, thinking back to how he had appeared when she had first met him.

“And a pretty terrible one, in the end.” When she looked at her father questioningly, he admitted, “You know he’s still not who I would have chosen for you. But a villain wouldn’t have done what he did.”

He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, as if they had gone back fifteen years, and he was soothing her to sleep after a bad dream. “Killian did the right thing. Don’t take that away from him by second-guessing." 

She wouldn’t. There was too much to think about for the future to spend time regretting the past. But she was no longer seven years old, and her father, much as he had comforted her, couldn’t chase away all the monsters that might lurk in the dark.

*****

Emma was about thirty-five weeks along when, toward the end of one of their visits, Killian said to her, “There’s something I have to show you. A present, for the baby.”

Balancing the phone between his head and shoulder, he picked up a sketchbook that he must have had on his lap the entire time. It took some doing, but he had clearly gotten more used to working without his hook over the past six months, and managed to hold it and turn the pages one-handed.

On each page was a drawing of the two of them. Sailing on Kristoff’s boat. Killian putting Emma’s ring back on her finger. Riding toward the coast in that ridiculous yellow bug. The two of them in a cabin, Emma’s hand on Killian’s hook in what she knew must be the moment she had told him to leave it on, just before she had first told him she loved him.

“I never knew you could draw,” she said softly. There were so many little things they didn’t know about each other, that there had never been time to learn.

“I hadn’t done it for years.” He closed the book, taking the phone back in his hand. “I was just thinking that we really didn’t have any pictures.”

“The baby is going to get to know you with or without pictures,” said Emma. “I’ll bring him or her to visit all the time.”

“No,” he said, with an intensity Emma hadn’t heard from him for some time. “I promised you that I would never ask you to leave me again, and I won’t. But I don’t want our child growing up around all this. Not more than I can help.”

“Killian,” Emma started to argue, but he cut her off.

“I’m not saying it has to be forever,” he said. “When they’re old enough to start asking questions, then maybe. But until then, this is how I want them to think of me.”

The buzzer signaling the end of visiting time sounded. “Then they will,” said Emma. “Through that, and from me.”

He smiled a little sadly. “You always were a hell of a storyteller, Swan,” he said, kissing his own fingertips and pressing them to the glass before the guards came to lead him off, past where Emma’s eyes could no longer follow.


	16. Hope

Killian had experienced a number of tense moments in his life. Yet not since the day of Liam’s execution could he remember feeling as much blind panic as he did when he arrived for a visit with Emma to see David sitting there instead. It was three days from her due date and, as Nemo had promised Emma that if her parents called he would tell Killian as soon as Emma went into labor – and let him use the phone in his office to speak to her himself as soon as she was ready after the baby was born – he knew that it wasn’t that. 

David, anticipating his fear, immediately reassured Killian that Emma and the baby were both fine. “It’s just that the doctor says it might be any time now, and Mary Margaret and I really didn’t want her pushing herself.”

“And Emma listened?” said Killian incredulously.

“It took some persuading,” David admitted.  

If Emma couldn’t be there, Killian really did appreciate David’s willingness to come himself, especially considering the nature of their one and only prior conversation. Yet, gratitude aside, the two men really didn’t have a lot to say to each other. Once David had resorted to asking his second follow-up question on the dull logistics of Killian’s job in the prison library, Killian decided it was time to take pity on his father-in-law.

“Look, David, it was really decent of you to visit, but you don’t have to stay the full hour.”

Instead of looking relieved, David gave a furtive glance around the room and lowered his voice, almost whispering into the receiver.

“Alright, but there’s something I need to tell you first. Do you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you.” David might not actually _like_ him – might even hate that he was part of Emma’s life – but Killian had no doubt that he could rely on the other man to look out for his best interests.

“Then listen. In a few hours, something…not great is going to happen. You’re going to be angry, but don’t fight it. Believe me, it will be for the best.”

“David, what the hell -”

David raised his voice. “I’ll give Emma your love, then,” he said, and hung up the phone. 

Back in his cell, Killian paced the narrow room in distraction ,wondering what David could possibly have meant. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. At minimum, it implied that David had some information on the inner workings of the prison that he shouldn’t; probably, that he was somehow colluding with someone inside it. That was potentially dangerous, and the last thing that Killian wanted was for anyone else in Emma’s family to compromise themselves. Especially not now. 

“Not great,” in the context of Killian’s current life, might mean anything from the always humiliating experience of a random search, to the passing of a restrictive new regulation, to a transfer to another prison. How any of these things could be for the best, he wasn’t sure. Could David be intending to sneak him contraband, somehow? Short of a surreptitious way of more frequently communicating with Emma, there wasn’t anything Killian could think of that he wanted that would be worth the trouble, and nothing at all that would be worth the risk. He supposed a transfer might land him somewhere that would grant him slightly more freedom, but he didn’t think there was any other facility within a reasonable distance from the Nolans. 

In any case, without any real idea of what David was talking about, there wasn’t much Killian could do to plan for it. David hadn’t told him to be on his guard; he had spoken of whatever would happen as an inevitability to be accepted. Even so, Killian was immediately wary when, on line for dinner, a voice behind him shouted “Hey, Jones! Over here!”

He spun around, only to be clocked on the jaw by a young man who had arrived only a few weeks earlier. Killian thought that his name was Scarlet, and knew of absolutely no reason the man would have for attacking him. 

Even without David’s warning, Killian wasn’t intending to fight back. Not here, at least. Finding discreet ways of striking back at anyone with notions of coming after him – and there had been a few, though it had been months now since anyone had tried anything – was a matter of survival. But, though Killian knew there was every chance that nothing he did or didn’t do would convince a parole board to release him an instant before his time was up, if there was even a possibility of getting out earlier, he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize it. Instead, therefore, of giving Scarlet a lesson in exactly how much damage a one-handed man could inflict, provided that hand were wielded effectively enough, Killian dodged, backing away from the other man, only to feel his arms seized from behind by what he a moment later realized were two guards. It gave him no satisfaction to see that Scarlet was being similarly restrained.

“Come, now, you know the penalty for fighting,” barked one of the guards.

Oh, _fuck._ “I didn’t touch him!” Killian couldn’t help but protest as his arms were cuffed roughly behind him. “He came at me out of nowhere!” 

But then he realized: _Don’t fight it_. David hadn’t been talking about fighting Will Scarlet. He had been talking about _this_.

Or, at least, that was what Killian was very much hoping as the door to the cell in solitary closed behind him. 

*****

This cell wasn’t even big enough to pace in. Killian felt the beginnings of claustrophobia setting in, which was saying something, as he had once spent a full night hiding out from Regina’s men in an empty coffin. But he knew it wasn’t the lack of space, but the sense of helplessness that was affecting him. He thought he could trust Nemo to keep him updated on Emma regardless, but Nemo didn’t handle everything around this place, and if they kept him in here for any length of time, with no phone calls, no visiting privileges… 

Well. David Nolan had better know what he was doing.

Killian thought he had some idea now, of what that might be. If David had _wanted_ Killian sent to solitary, it was probably because he had some reason to believe it was the safest place for him. Something, he suspected, was brewing in the prison, and David wanted Killian well out of it.

If that was it, Killian wished that David had trusted him to handle it himself. Figuring out possible methods of escape had been more a matter of lingering professional pride than a legitimate precaution, but if he ever _were_ to find himself in mortal danger, Killian could think of at least three ways of getting himself out. Short of anything that bad, he should have been able to manage without getting himself into any trouble – or, at least, without getting himself into any trouble leading to worse than his current predicament. 

A slight noise broke the silence as the grate in the cell door opened and a meal tray was slid inside. Killian didn’t feel much like eating, but knew he would regret it later if he didn’t. While the food here was adequate for someone whose idea of fine cuisine for the past decade or so had been Granny’s, they didn’t get enough of it that Killian could afford to skip a meal.

He picked at the stringy chicken and undercooked vegetables without enthusiasm. It hadn’t been reheated, and the few hours it had spent cooling since dinner couldn’t have improved the taste any. He might as well take his time on it, Killian thought, as there was absolutely nothing else for him to occupy himself with once he was done. Although even if there had been, he realized, he was growing tired.

He put the fork down, and pushed the tray off to the side, lying down on the thin cot. Nemo was fair. He would probably go to bat for Killian if they tried to keep him in here too long. Maybe it would all be sorted by the morning… 

*****

Killian woke to considerably more noise and light than he had gone to sleep to. He was lying, he realized after a moment of disorientation, on an actual bed, and when he looked to his right, he saw that he was connected to a machine measuring his heartbeat and other vitals. Though Killian had never been to the prison infirmary, when he saw the several unbarred windows that made up much of the opposite wall, he very much doubted that this was it. 

“Morning,” said a voice, before Killian’s still-sluggish thoughts could start piecing themselves into anything resembling coherence. He turned to the other side, and was astonished to see David sitting at a chair by his bedside.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where am I?”

“Apparently, you were found unresponsive in your cell, so they sent you to the hospital. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with you, but they’re going to keep you a day or so for observation.” He paused, and then repeated, with the tone of someone who thought his listener was being particularly slow on the uptake. “You’re in the _hospital_.”

Suddenly, Killian was wide awake. The hospital. “Emma,” he breathed.

“Through that door,” said David. “She doesn’t know you’re here.” 

Killian tore the monitors off of himself, setting off a cacophony of beeping from the machines. As he leaped up, David interposed himself between Killian and the door.

“Whoa!” he said. “Scrub up and wash your hands. You’re about to help deliver my grandkid.”

When he finally opened the door, it was to the sound of Emma’s groaning. Her face was wet with sweat and tears, and she was clutching her mother’s hand tightly. She had thrown her head back, eyes shut against the pain, and so it was Mary Margaret who saw Killian first, her face breaking out into a joyful but unsurprised expression that told him that she, at least, had been expecting him. She motioned him forward and silently ceded her place at Emma’s side, disentangling her hand from Emma’s grip so that Killian could replace it, almost seamlessly, with his own.

“I’m here, love,” he said, and Emma’s head shot up, her eyes now open.

“Killian!” she sobbed, the texture of her cries changing. Weakly, she tried to raise herself slightly on the bed, and he leaned forward to meet her lips in a kiss. “How are you here?”

“I’m still not sure,” he admitted. “But I’m getting the distinct sense your parents had something to do with it.”

She let out a sound that might have been an incredulous laugh, and then asked, “How long?”

“All day, I think,” said Killian. “But as I don’t want to test it, I think now’s the part where I’m supposed to tell you to push.”

If Killian had been able to attend birthing classes with Emma, he might have been able to offer some more useful advice as she suffered through the last stages of labor. But in the end, perhaps he couldn’t have done any better than holding her hand, and stroking her hair, and telling her again and again that she was doing fine, and that he loved her. Finally, after a great, last, push, a different kind of cry sounded through the room. 

“It’s a girl,” announced the doctor, adding to Killian,” Would you like to cut the cord?”

 _Not with a pair of scissors,_ was his first thought, but, lacking his chosen alternative, he accepted the shears, and a few moments later, his daughter was being placed in his arms. Despite the warm blanket that had been wrapped around her, she was still wailing, apparently outraged at having been ripped away from Emma. More than any other new father, Killian could sympathize. 

When the volume of her cries had subsided, and she was half-looking at him, Killian spoke. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “Welcome to a brand new world.” 

*****

A few hours later, Emma, despite her determination not to waste a moment of their time together, had finally succumbed to sleep. No one had tried to suggest taking the baby to the nursery, and Killian had been holding her almost the entire time. “I’ll have plenty of chances,” said Emma, when she passed her back to Killian not long after he had presented her to Emma. “This is your turn.” 

The baby, too, was sleeping, though not soundly. Killian rocked her gently, hushing her softly whenever she let out a fretful noise.

“You’re good with her,” said a woman’s voice.

Killian looked up warily as the nurse came forward. He had worked out that the medical staff had to be in on the compassionate criminal conspiracy that was Killian’s presence in their hospital, but he couldn’t shake the immediate protective instinct, or the fear that someone would say or do something to get him taken away sooner than he had to be.

The nurse’s next words didn’t do anything to allay his anxieties, though her voice sounded more sad than it did angry or threatening. “Don’t you recognize me, Hook?”

He held the baby tighter to his chest as he studied the woman's face more closely. She was probably in her mid-twenties. She certainly wasn’t from Sherwood, and Killian had never made a habit of robbing young women.

Then, something in the face gave it away. “Ava,” he said. It wasn’t a question. As improbable as it might be, once he recognized her, it seemed somehow appropriate that it would be now, on this day of all days, that he should be confronted with this particular ghost from his past. The first child he had helped; the first child he had betrayed.

“I can never forgive you,” she said quietly.

“I wouldn’t ask you to.” 

“That man you killed – it’s on my head, too.”

Killian didn’t argue, knowing it would be useless. It hadn’t been Ava’s fault, but she had been the cause, however, innocent. Instead, he said, “You made me better. God knows I was still bad enough after, but the good I did – that was also you.” Emma had finished it, but it was this girl, this woman, who had begun the process of making Killian the man he had become. 

“I think I always knew,” Ava said. “Some part of me always knew, that you had been the one who had sent the money.” And Killian realized that she hated him for that, too, maybe even more than for the guard. “But however you did it, you gave me my father back. And I believe in paying my debts.”

Killian looked up from where his daughter’s eyes had opened. They might darken later, but for now, they were the same color and shade as his own. “After today, unless I’m very lucky, I’m not going to touch my child again until she’s a grown woman. Don’t tell me about paying debts. 

Ava started to turn away, possibly unsure how to respond to the obvious emotion in Killian’s voice. Before she could go, he called, “Thank you.”

“Then we’re even, now,” she said, sounding almost like the child he remembered.

“We’re even,” he agreed, though as she walked away, and he returned to memorizing every detail of his daughter’s face, he knew they never would be.

*****

Too soon, David’s phone rang, and he reluctantly stepped back into the room after answering it to tell Killian that the time had come for him to go back. Everyone left to give Emma and Killian a final moment together. After they had embraced, both weeping, one last time, he picked up the baby from where he had laid her down in the crib. She, unlike her parents, was not crying, and looked up at Killian more alertly than she had yet done, as if she, too, could somehow sense the significance of the moment.

“She won’t remember this,” he said to Emma. “So you’re going to have to tell her what I said.”

“Every word,” she promised.

“Hello, little love,” he began. “I’m so sorry that I have to leave you, and I want you to know that, if I could, I would stay forever, and never let you go.” Killian took her tiny hand in his from where she was resting it on the blanket. “You have the best mommy in the world, and a grandmother and grandfather who are going to take such good care of you, and love you so much. But I also want you to know something else.”  He maneuvered his arms so that her ear was pressed to the left side of his chest. “Hear that? It’s my heart. It belongs to you, and your mother. And wherever I am, wherever you are, you’ll never be an inch further away from it than you are right now. And as for your name…”

He and Emma had deferred this moment, as if unwilling to acknowledge that their hours had been running short, that they didn’t have all the time in the world for the choosing. But when Killian, in spite of all the pain at what he was losing, looked back on the miracle of that day, thought of all the winding paths that had converged in the existence of the child in his arms, he had it.

He looked at Emma. “What do you think of Hope?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While this fic provides ample evidence that I am not afraid of unabashed sentimentality, I wouldn't have had the nerve to do anything quite as twee as have Killian and Emma name their kid Hope if it weren't canon, but as it is it was too perfect to resist.
> 
> For anyone who needs a refresher on Ava's backstory: a few years into Regina's reign, Ava's father wound up in prison for debt. Killian was at this point pretty much living in a haze of alcohol and petty theft, punctuated by half-baked attempts at killing or, short of that, at least embarassing Regina. Some of his more daring moves against the crown had already gotten him a reputation, and eleven-year-old Ava, naively thinking of him - because he was an enemy of Regina's -- as some sort of romantic figure, comes to him, with her younger brother, for help. Killian feels sorry for them and takes them in for a while, planning in the meantime a larger-scale robbery in order to get enough money to free their father. He gets away with it, but is interrupted by a security guard, who he kills (after the guy shoots him, but still totally unjustified). Ava finds out what happened, and is so horrified that she leaves, refusing the money. It is at that point that Killian has the idea of inventing Robin Hood as a way of getting Ava to accept his help- and because he legitimately feels bad about not living up to her image of him. After he's established a reputation for Robin, he leaves Ava money with a note claiming it is a gift from Robin Hood. 
> 
> As I wrote this chapter, I decided to leave out most of the more exposition-y details of how the plan for getting Killian to the hospital worked, which wound up distracting from the emotional tone I was trying to set, but to clarify for anyone who wants/needs it: By the time David visited Killian, Emma was already in the early stages of what thankfully turned out to be a long enough labor for Killian to get there in time. As Killian in part gathered, David and Mary Margaret, with help from a couple of known sympathizers among the guards (and the promise of a willing blind eye from Nemo) engineered Killian's trip to solitary, which a) meant that no one would wonder where he was when they didn't see him the next day, assuming he was still locked down in isolation, and b) ensured that Killian would be getting his dinner delivered separately, allowing them to get him a meal dosed with something that would knock him out. It was Ava who first suggested to the Nolans at least the basic idea of getting Killian sent to the hospital as a patient himself, and who then recruited allies within the hospital to make sure they could pull it off. She also provided the drugs for Killian's food, with instructions for a safe and effective dosage. She did not explain her history with Killian to anyone else involved.


	17. Living

Despite the name he had given to his daughter, Killian couldn’t help but fall into a depression in the weeks after Hope was born. Since he had turned himself in, as soon as it had become clear that he wasn’t going to be killed on sight, Killian had mostly coped with the prospect of what awaited him by adopting a grim fatalism: he had known that his life was effectively over the minute he made his decision to leave Kristoff’s boat. Any bit of happiness or contentment that came after it should be regarded as an unexpected bonus, a few moments stolen back from the brink of the grave. 

If that was so, the unimaginable privilege of being present for his daughter’s birth had been Killian’s most spectacular theft. But it was so terribly hard to maintain any kind of stoicism about his imprisonment after such a tangible reminder of all that has was missing. Emma, as he had known she would, did everything she possibly could – short of violating Killian’s own wishes on bringing Hope for a visit –to keep him updated on the baby’s progress; Killian was sure that never in history had there been another baby, not excepting young royalty, as frequently photographed as Hope Jones. It was better, infinitely better, than nothing, and even better still was hearing Emma’s own account of her own and their daughter’s life. Yet then, inevitably, she would leave, and Killian would have to confront once again the unrelenting torpor of his wasted existence.

Hope was perhaps a few months old when Nemo called Killian into his office one day. “I noticed you didn’t sign up for any classes,” he said when Killian had sat down.

Killian knew, of course, what he was talking about; the prison offered both high school and college degree programs. But that was for men with three or five-year sentences, for whom this was an unpleasant interruption rather than a more or less permanent state of being.

“I’m going to be over fifty by the time I leave here,” said Killian flatly. “I don’t think a high-school diploma is going to do me much good.”

“It won’t do you much harm,” said Nemo. “Now or when you’re fifty. I’m sixty-five myself.” He waited for a response, and when Killian didn’t give him one, he added, with a tone of faux innocence, “Why don’t you talk it over with your wife?”

Sneaky bastard. As soon as Nemo said it, Killian knew he no longer had a choice. It hadn’t been clear that anyone who took Emma’s classes in Sherwood would ever find much use for what they were learning either. Well, at least it would make Emma happy, and not just because he was well aware that she still harbored illusions of getting him pardoned. Killian had never shared his philosophy of prison life with Emma, but he rather suspected that she wouldn’t approve.

After starting the coursework, however, Killian had to admit that he had very quickly stopped doing it only for Emma’s benefit. Liam had always been the student, when they were children, but now, perhaps simply because of the lack of appealing alternatives, Killian found himself enjoying subjects like geometry and chemistry and ancient history. When he passed the exams for his high school equivalency degree, Emma arrived for their next visit with a picture of Hope wearing a tiny mortarboard and tassel.

Neither was this Nemo’s only sly intervention in Killian’s life. Even with the classes, the prison library was never terribly busy, so Killian had been surprised – and not pleasantly – when he was told that he was going to be assigned an assistant. He was even less pleased when the person who showed up the next day turned out to be Will Scarlet. 

Killian still didn’t know the details of precisely how his trip to the hospital had been arranged; he had been too desperate to spend what little time he could with Emma and Hope to press for explanations, and it seemed in any case something that it would be safer for all involved to talk about as little as possible. He was fairly confident, however, that Scarlet had _not_ been in on the plan, an impression confirmed when the man restarted their acquaintance with a sheepish, “I suppose I owe you an apology.”

Killian didn’t answer, not inclined to be helpful. Given that Scarlet had almost certainly been put up to attacking him at the (indirect, he hoped) behest of Killian’s own in-laws, he had deemed it unnecessary, if not unsporting, to take any reprisals against the younger man, but that didn’t mean he had any particularly fond feelings toward him. _He_ hadn’t known it was all for Killian’s own good. Let Scarlet squirm for a while longer.

Seeing that more explanation was called for, Scarlet continued, “It wasn’t personal, or anything. Got a note promising someone’d put me in for good behavior points if I went after you."

“And it didn’t occur to you that you could also get points for good behavior just by _not_ punching people in the face?” Scarlet, Killian knew, had been involved in several fights since then as well. “What are you in here for, anyway?”

“Robbed a liquor store,” he said.

“Well you must have done a piss-poor job of it,” said Killian. “Liquor stores are easy. I think my five-month old could figure out how to crack one of those registers.”

“I wasn’t trying to steal money.” 

Killian marveled at the sheer idiocy of it. So the man had landed himself in prison holding up a liquor store for actual liquor. But as he looked at him, Killian realized that he was scarcely a man at all, probably not yet twenty.

“What did you need a drink so badly for?”

“Worked for Regina.” 

Given who he was speaking to, Killian had to give him credit for bravery for admitting it. “Quite sure coming after me wasn’t at least a little personal?”

“No,” said Scarlet, his voice a little firmer. “I owe you for that more than anyone.” 

Ah, so that was it. Nemo had sent Scarlet here hoping that Killian would _save_ him. He didn’t know if he would take it that far, but he thought he could, at least, forgive him. “I worked for her too, once,” he finally replied. “And probably for stupider reasons.” Whatever his story, Scarlet didn’t seem much like an ideologue. Deciding it was time to change the subject, he said, “You don’t know the first thing about libraries, do you?”

“No.”

“How’s your reading?”

“Not great.” 

Will must have been puzzled when Killian smiled. “Then we’ll start in the literacy section,” he said. “I may have a few books to recommend.”

***** 

The thing about small children, Emma had many occasions to remember as Hope passed from infancy to toddlerhood, was that they accepted the world as they found it. Hope knew that she lived with three adults who adored and cared for her, and had little reason to think that there was anything at all unusual about the arrangement. She had met other children, of course, who lived with mothers and fathers (Emma didn’t think Hope had quite worked out yet that grandma and grandpa were also _Emma’s_ mother and father), but also knew children living in a variety of differently constituted households. Indeed, the combination of their Sherwood friends and the various people – including plenty of orphans – Emma and her parents had aided in the course of their work with the foundation meant that, if anything, two-parent households were to Hope an exception rather than the rule. Ashley’s Alexandra, whom Hope admired greatly, didn’t have a father. Neither did Ruby’s son, born a year after Hope. Emma didn’t know who the boy’s father was, and neither, as far as she could tell, did Ruby. 

Hope, in short, didn’t know what she was missing. In a way, that was a good thing, part of what Killian had wanted when he asked Emma not to bring her for visits. But _Emma_ knew, and the great joy she took in raising her daughter would always be tempered by that knowledge. She felt a particular pang every time anyone referred to her as a single mother. Even on a practical level, it was hardly true, except in the most technical sense; David and Mary Margaret were scarcely less active in raising Hope than Emma herself was. But far more than that, it felt like a betrayal to let such comments pass – as she almost always did – while knowing what Killian was sacrificing for Hope, and for Emma, every single day.

It wasn’t that Hope wasn’t aware, in a vague and abstract way, that she had a father. Following a version of the policy that Mary Margaret had pursued around Emma herself in the early days of Killian’s imprisonment, Emma made sure to refer to Killian often around Hope. Since she had been old enough to know anything, Hope had known that Mommy went to visit Daddy, that she would come home with an extra kiss for her from him, that he had drawn many of the sketches that adorned her walls. She knew that people sometimes told her she looked like her daddy, and meant to be kind when they said it. She did not know that there were also people who, if they noticed the resemblance, would not consider it a kindness to point it out, and Emma hoped to shield her from that knowledge as long as possible.

But again, none of this, for a long while, seemed to register as peculiar to Hope. For her, evidently, just as some children had daddies and some children didn’t, if some children’s daddies happened to be unseen figures living in some undefinable elsewhere, accessible to their mothers but not, apparently, to them, then that, too, was simply a fact of nature, as ordinary as the sun rising or setting, and as little a reflection on any of the parties involved.

Small children, however, also grew, and quickly. Hope had just turned three when she started asking questions. It began, Emma thought, with a trip to Granny’s, a place Emma had finally started visiting again about six months earlier. Despite how happy she had been for Ruby, she still hadn’t been able to bear going when the place had officially reopened about a year before that, though Mary Margaret and David – who, in the wake of Regina’s death, had been able to openly bankroll the rebuilding – had been there representing the family.

It had been strange, very strange, being there again, even though Ruby had made what was perhaps a conscious attempt not to replicate the design of the original. The bar itself was on the other side of the room entirely from where it had been, and was more obviously divided from the family-style restaurant seating. In place of what had once been the back rooms was an expanded kitchen that served greatly improved offerings, which were advertised with actual menus at tables lit with electric lighting. It was not possible to say precisely where had been the window through which Emma had first entered the inn, or the clearing she had made for her classroom, or the spot at the wall that Killian had stood when he had sent the chandelier crashing down on the soldiers. Still less was it possible to know when she might be walking over the place where she had been tied up, where Regina’s body had fallen, where Emma had, with the same hands that now carried her daughter, picked up a gun and fired. But at some point, the paths of the two Emmas must have intersected across the years, one heading toward, one heading back inexorably to the fatal moment. Maybe even the paths of two Hopes; though Emma couldn’t be sure, she thought, when she did the calculations, that she might already have been pregnant on that day, her body accommodating itself to the earliest beginnings of the new life inside it.

Emma had come, in part, for Hope’s sake, thinking it would be good, as she got older, for her to spend more time among people who had known her father. The clientele and staff of Granny’s had both changed since the old days. Many people had left Sherwood once Regina had fallen, and outsiders were now sometimes drawn to the inn by what they knew of its history. Members of the latter group, though they had never, thankfully done anything brazen enough, to attract Hope’s notice – possibly because Ruby felt no compunction about ejecting anyone who so much as lifted a cell phone suspiciously in the child’s direction – often stared when they recognized Emma, pointing her out to others as if she were part of a tourist attraction. But there were still enough familiar faces there for the trip to be worth Emma’s while. When little John Darling – no longer all that little, and again living with his siblings in one of the (now subsidized) rooms in the inn that Ruby had reserved for housing older orphans – met Hope, he knelt solemnly and told her, “You know, I’m still your daddy’s first lieutenant. That means it’s my job to protect you.” 

Most people were mindful – even, for Emma’s purposes, excessively so – of the need for discretion around Hope. When they mentioned Killian, it was as a figure out of a shared past, not as someone still living, and not very far away, either. But one day, in the midst of one of these conversations, a woman asked Emma, “How _is_ Hook, anyway?”

Emma glanced at Hope. While she would give the woman the benefit of the doubt and assume she was asking out of concern rather than curiosity, she didn’t know her very well, and wouldn’t have been inclined to open up to her even if her three-year-old hadn’t been standing right there. “Oh, you know,” she said vaguely. “He’s managing.”

“Does he ever get to see Hope?” the woman went on, and the margin of doubt Emma was willing to extend to her grew thinner.

“Once,” she answered shortly, sending clear enough signals that the discussion was over that there were no further questions. 

Hope didn’t react right away, and given the mysteries of the three-year-old mind, Emma wasn’t certain that it had been the woman’s words, or something else said at Granny’s, or just the inevitable glimmerings of a more mature consciousness that led her to ask that night, “Where’s my daddy?”

Somehow unprepared, even after all the time that she had spent thinking of this moment, Emma gave her nothing more at first than the simplest, most literal answer: “He lives somewhere else.” If Hope were really ready, she told herself, she would keep asking. If not, Emma thought Killian would forgive her for wanting to keep her innocent for just a little longer.

“Why?” Hope returned, and Emma knew it was time. She took a book down from the highest level of the shelf; it was the sketchbook that Killian had drawn for Hope before she was born. Emma had sent the pages out to be professionally bound when Hope had still been an infant, and the book had been waiting for her ever since. Killian had supplied the illustrations. Emma would have to find the words. “Once upon a time,” she started, snuggling close to Hope in the bed, “there was an Evil Queen…”

It was a story that, unsurprisingly, took a lot of careful editing. She had decided long ago that she couldn’t totally whitewash Killian’s past, so she told Hope that “Daddy was so sad and angry that he did some not-nice things,” but quickly rushed to reassure her that  “he also helped a lot of people who the Queen didn’t like,” giving a few names that she would recognize. “That’s how Mommy met him,” she explained. “I said some things to make the Queen angry, and she was trying to hurt me. Your daddy kept me safe. And then we started helping more people together.” Aided by the pictures, she told her versions of some of these stories, too – saving Ruby, saving Grace and Anna.

Eventually, they got to the hardest part. “One day, Daddy and Mommy decided that they were going to try to stop the Queen from hurting any other people ever again. But when we tried to catch her, she caught us first, and tied us up, and was going to kill Daddy.” Hope knew, in a very basic way, that killing meant hurting someone so badly that they fell down and never got back up. “So Daddy had to kill her, to protect himself, and Mommy, and everyone.” It was necessary, but Emma still felt uncomfortable at how easily the lie came.

“But some people, who weren’t there, weren’t so sure that Daddy had done the right thing. They thought maybe he _wanted_ to kill the Queen, and not just stop her. They thought Mommy might have helped him, too. Daddy and Mommy tried to hide from the people who wanted to find them. But first, because we loved each other so much, we decided to get married so that no matter what happened, we would always be a family.” She turned to the page with the scene in Tuck’s cabin, allowing Hope to compare the ring picture-Killian was placing on picture-Emma’s finger with the one she was wearing.

 “But people were still looking for Daddy and Mommy, and soon we knew that a baby was growing inside Mommy. Daddy was scared that Mommy would get into trouble. So because he loved Mommy so much, and you too, even though you weren’t even born yet, he went to the people who were looking for us, so that they would leave Mommy alone. Even though it meant he wouldn’t be able to be with us, and that they would take him away to a place called a jail, where grown-ups who make very bad mistakes sometimes have to go to live.” Some people would have used the comparison to a time-out, but such a thing didn’t exist in the Nolan-Jones household, nor was it used, Emma had made sure to verify, by the liberal-minded nursery school that Hope attended. It might be irrational, but the thought of telling Killian that that particular punishment had ever been given to his daughter made Emma feel physically ill.

“So the bad people caught him?” Hope asked, her eyes – Killian’s eyes – very round in her face. 

“They aren’t bad people,” Emma had to admit. “They just made a mistake, too. A different kind.”

Then Hope asked if Daddy had ever met her. It was undoubtedly foolish to offer a three-year-old any details of an event that had been enabled by several felonies, but Emma decided to take her chances. She told Hope, as she had promised, every word that Killian had said on the day she was born. When she got to the part where he had held her to his heart, she put Hope’s ear to her own breast.

Hope didn’t ask any other questions that night. Those came gradually and unpredictably over the next several months, in which time Hope frequently asked Emma for “the Daddy story,” or, sometimes, to tell her again how she got her name. 

One day, it was “What happened to Daddy’s hand?” That, despite the slightly gory explanation, had been a fairly pleasant conversation that ended in Emma showing Hope Killian’s hook, which she regarded in fascination as an image from her storybook come to life.

Others were more painful. Eventually, Hope asked “Is Daddy ever coming home?” a particularly ill-timed question given that Emma’s latest petition for a pardon had just been denied.

“Someday,” Emma said. “But maybe not for a long, long time. Maybe,” she added with difficulty, hating to do it but not wanting Hope, too, to wear herself away with vain wishes, “not even until you’re almost grown.”

Hope cried at that, and Emma reminded her again what Daddy had said, when she was born, about her always being near to him. It didn’t help.

Another time, Hope wondered why they couldn’t just _tell_ the people that they had made a mistake and should let Daddy go.

“We tried,” said Emma, and this time, the lie didn’t come easy. “Sometimes, things just don’t work the way we want them to.”

And then, finally, it arrived. The day that it dawned on Hope that Killian might not have to come home for her to see him. “Can I go and visit Daddy?”

Emma had been prepared for this. Hope, as Emma sometimes had to remind herself, was not the only child in the world with a father in prison, and far before Hope would have been old enough for it, Mary Margaret had hesitantly given Emma a children’s book written for the purpose of explaining the incarceration of a parent to preschoolers. At the time, Emma hadn’t been willing to look at it, telling herself that Killian would be home before it became necessary. Now, however, it proved helpful in giving Hope an honest but unthreatening picture of what she could expect at a visit – the security check, the guards, above all, the lack of all physical contact.

“Do you still think you might want to come?” asked Emma when she was done reading. “It’s OK if you want to wait until you’re older.” 

Hope reiterated that she wanted to go, and so when Killian called that night, Emma told him, not framing it as a question, “I think I’m going to bring Hope with me tomorrow.” 

The line went silent for long enough that Emma started to think they had been disconnected before Killian said, “Your idea, or hers?”

“Hers,” Emma maintained. “But I think she’s ready.” 

“You _think_?”

“She’s three, Killian. She might freak out before she gets past the parking lot. Or get bored after five minutes. If she does, my mother will be in the waiting room just in case, and I won’t push her to try again. But she asked, and I’m not saying no.”

After a beat, he said, “Well, I’d like to say I’ll be sure to wear my best, but as it is…”

She recognized it for the deflection that it was, but laughed shakily anyway, needing it almost as much as he did.

“We’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said, acutely aware of her first use of “we,” in this context. “Love you.”

“I love you too, Swan,” he replied. “Have a good night.” As she hung up the phone, however, she had a feeling that neither of them would be getting much sleep.

*****

Hope did not freak out in the parking lot, nor did she ask to leave after five minutes. If either Emma or Killian, however, had been expecting an immediate rush of magic at the first meeting between father and daughter in over three and a half years, they would have been disappointed. Killian, Emma could easily tell from both his face and voice, was moved by the very sight of her across the partition, but Hope, after a soft, initial, “Hi” had grown shy, and it took some effort from Emma to draw her back out. The truth was that this wasn’t an ideal set-up for – well, for _anyone_ , actually, but especially for a very young child, so reliant on touch to bridge the gaps that words couldn’t yet adequately supply.

As the minutes went on, however, Hope seemed to grow a little more relaxed, and began to ask Killian some questions of her own. Where did he sleep? In his room, he euphemistically replied. Could she see it? (No, but it had pictures of her all over it). Where did he eat? (In a cafeteria – a big room, with lots of other people). Did he have friends. (Yes, a few, and if this was an exaggeration, Emma thought that it was by now only a slight one).

When Hope had exhausted her limited capacity for imagining Killian’s world, she said, “Tell me about when I was born.”

Emma and Killian both glanced to each side in worry – Hope wasn’t being especially quiet – but no one else seemed to be paying a bit of attention to the private drama playing out before them. “Okay,” said Killian, leaning forward conspiratorially, “But remember: it has to be our special secret. Just the three of us. And grandma and grandpa,” he allowed, completing the family circle. “Do you think you can remember that?” 

“I’ll remember,” said Hope in her most serious voice. She probably wouldn’t – not all the time – but enough time had passed that Emma thought no one was going to bother looking too closely into matters on the word of a nursery schooler.

“Well, then. The truth is, I wasn’t supposed to be there at all. But then, I went to sleep in a….room, here, and then when I woke up, _poof!_ – just like that, I was at the hospital, right in time for the birthday of a very special little lady.”

He went on, and Emma, despite having told her own version of this story so many times before, was scarcely less entranced than Hope; she had never heard it, after all, from his perspective. By the time he neared the end, he was getting choked up, and before Hope could notice, Emma cut in, “You know this part yourself, Hope. Why don’t you show Daddy?” So she did, providing her own, only slightly garbled version of the speech Emma had repeated to her so many times before.

Whatever it did to Emma and Killian, Hope seemed totally unaffected by the scene, delivering her lines with a deliberate, recitative quality. It was so hard to know, sometimes, how much a child was absorbing, or how little. Yet soon after, once Hope had clearly come to the end of her attention span (she hadn’t lasted the whole hour, but had gotten much closer than Emma had been expecting), and Emma had decided it was time to go, she suddenly took the phone away from her ear, slapping it clumsily somewhere in the center of her torso. Hope having apparently forgotten that Killian couldn’t hear her once she was no longer speaking into the receiver, it fell to Emma to tell him what she had said, though she found it hard to get the words out herself.

“She wanted you to hear her heart beat,” she managed finally. “She says now you’re part of hers, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one more chapter to go, to be posted this weekend.


	18. Storytelling

Hope didn’t, after that first day, accompany Emma on all of her visits. Killian and Emma had decided together that once a week would be enough, not wanting Hope to grow too familiar with the insides of a prison. Now and then, she missed a week, unwilling to leave whatever else she was doing when the time came for Emma to go. Somewhat more often, she persuaded Emma to take her twice against her better judgment – usually, Killian gathered, with the aid of a lot of screaming. Visits could be as short as twenty minutes or as long as the full hour, depending on Hope’s mood; occasionally, Emma would take a restless Hope back to David or Mary Margaret in the waiting room, only for them to bring her back again before the hour was up. Between visits, Hope would normally get on the phone for a few minutes during his calls with Emma, once or twice leading to rather surreal scenes in which a line of prisoners were left waiting while the former Captain Hook sang a lullaby to his daughter.

But however much or little he interacted with Hope in a given week, Killian couldn’t stop being grateful for the gift that her regular presence in his life had become. Every Wednesday, in preparation for her usual Thursday visit, Killian would draw a new picture for her, usually creating a story to go along with it. Sometimes, the drawings included, not only Killian or Emma or Hope, but other friends and acquaintances, as Hope, even if she had theoretically known it earlier, could be reliably delighted by reminders that Killian knew people that she thought of as a part of _her_ world like Ruby or Tink or Ashley. Hope, too, came bearing pictures, either photographs or her own avant-garde productions – which, as the months went by and she became noticeably more verbal, led to increasingly discursive explanations about what each one was meant to signify. At the end of visits, she would press her lips directly against the glass. Killian supposed this was not strictly hygienic, but it never stopped him from mirroring the gesture.

Outside of Hope and Emma’s visits, Killian’s life was, if certainly nothing that could be called _good_ – not with the daily indignities that were, aside from the forced separation from his family, the worst part of prison living – at least more bearable than he had expected it to be. He had nearly completed an Associate’s Degree, and was planning on following it up by going for a Bachelor’s, probably in literature. Circumstances had put him in the position of helping a few more men than just Will Scarlet, and not only with their reading: it had become generally known among the inmates that Killian’s wife and in-laws ran a charitable foundation (or, as someone once put it more crassly, “were fucking loaded”), and people sometimes sought out Killian’s advice on resources for their own family members on the outside. On a few occasions, this led to Killian and Emma more or less tag-teaming on a case, with Killian sending Emma out on missions of mercy in a virtual reversal of their old dynamic, and it felt good, even in this diminished form, to be working together for a purpose outside their own immediate concerns.

Near the start of the fifth year of Killian’s sentence, Will Scarlet was paroled, announcing the news to Killian with an awkwardness that he thought came half from compassion for Killian, and half from fear for himself: Will didn’t have much waiting for him beyond the prison gates. 

Killian couldn’t help the rush of jealousy that was his immediate reaction to Will’s impending release. Jealousy, and regret: happy as he was for Will, the man had become, in the past three years, possibly the closest friend that Killian had ever had, and he would miss him. But biting down his selfishness, he managed a smile, telling Will, “You’ll have to give Hope a hug for me.” 

“Your daughter?” said Will blankly.

Killian sighed impatiently. Will had come a long way, but he could still be a bit slow on the uptake. Although in this case, he thought it was more a reluctance to be disappointed than any lack of native quickness that was stopping him from coming to the obvious conclusion. “Do you think I would leave you, of all people, on your own once you get out of here? Emma and her parents will find a place for you. Call me wildly optimistic,” he added dryly, “But I’m thinking they’ll be willing to overlook the criminal record.” 

They did better than that, even letting Will stay with them for a few weeks until they’d secured him housing and a job working in a warehouse. Killian was, even more than in other cases, glad to have helped; beyond his friendship with Will, Hope seemed to have the distinct impression that Killian’s life had been nothing but a series of oft-misunderstood charitable endeavors, no less legitimate than anything her mother or grandparents got up to, and anything Killian could do to come closer to living up to her image was time well spent. Very few sinners, he reflected, were given as many opportunities for at least a measure of atonement as Killian had been, let alone the chance to do so while enjoying the support of an endlessly loving wife and daughter. He was grateful. Really, he was. 

It wasn’t enough.

*****

Emma was thrilled at the warm relationship that Hope had managed, despite all the odds against it, to develop with Killian. But the advent of Hope’s father as an active force in her life, while on balance overwhelmingly positive, was not without complications. 

Some of these complications barely troubled Emma. Hope, for a time after the visits first began, adopted the habit of talking about Killian almost incessantly, blithely regardless of any possible considerations of time or place or audience. For the first year or two after it had become clear what line the Nolans had been planning to take on their disgraceful son-in-law and scarcely less shameful daughter, many of their society connections had dropped them, whether in principled anger (Emma couldn’t actually blame Aurora and Philip Briars for ending the friendship) or calculated distancing or sheer discomfort at visiting a household where, on top of everything else, social events might involve rubbing shoulders with former prostitutes, junkies, and other disreputables. In time, however, some of them – plus extras – had returned, as the Foundation became more and more recognized as an institution bringing stability and compassion to the post-Regina era. Had things been different, Mary Margaret, David, and possibly even Emma herself might have emerged as serious political players. Even as it was, while those closest to Arthur stayed away, many others found it more beneficial to be seen in the Nolan’s orbit than otherwise – or, more charitably, actually wanted to help.

Hope, in these settings, far surpassed even her grandmother’s calculated or her mother’s more prideful tactlessness regarding Killian. On the comparatively innocuous end of the spectrum were things like showing off a new drawing from her father to the assembled crowd. Other incidents made it harder for guests to come up with a polite response. When someone mentioned Regina in front of her, Hope once helpfully interjected with “That’s the bad Queen my daddy killed.” While Will Scarlet had been staying with them, and on his subsequent visits, Hope felt it incumbent upon herself to perform her duty as hostess by introducing him as “Daddy’s friend Will, from jail.” Emma had been concerned for Will’s sake, but once she had ascertained that he was unfazed by Hope’s honesty, she gave herself permission to be amused by it, as was Killian, when she shared it with him.

Someday, Emma would have to have a serious talk with Hope about appropriate and inappropriate topics of conversation, and a more serious one still about what reasons otherwise good and decent people might have to be less enamored than Hope and Emma were with Killian Jones. But for now, the last thing Emma wanted to do was to give her four-year-old daughter any reason to think she needed to be ashamed about her father. And, if Emma were honest, she herself took a somewhat vindictive pleasure in Hope’s capacity to discomfit people whose judgment of Killian Emma found less than high-minded. Hope’s preschool teacher once took Emma aside at pick-up to observe that Hope had been talking a lot about her father, apparently regarding this as a serious problem in need of immediate addressing. When Emma pressed her, it turned out that what the teacher called “inappropriate,” in this case, consisted of little more than Hope having the temerity to acknowledge openly that she had a father in jail whom she loved and was excited to visit.

“I’m sorry,” Emma responded, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “that the fact the Hope’s father is in prison is so difficult for you,” finishing by informing her more bluntly that as Hope got to spend so little time with Killian as it was, she would be damned if she’d tell her she couldn’t _talk_ about him as much as she pleased.  

But if Emma could handle anyone else’s issues with Hope’s relationship with her father, she couldn’t bear to see as her growing love of Killian began to affect Hope herself in more painful ways. At first, Hope had seemed to regard their necessarily limited interactions as something like a special and exclusive treat, much more exciting than anything as ordinary as her relationships with Emma or Mary Margaret or David. Inevitably, however, this wore thin, and Hope’s gradual recognition of the true nature of their situation was heartbreaking to watch. The first sign of it came obliquely, in a terrible tantrum Hope threw when Emma had to turn down her increasingly insistent demands that they bring Daddy his hook.

“But he _needs_ it,” she had sobbed, when Emma had explained that he wasn’t allowed to have it in the prison. “It isn’t _fair_.”

Next came the pictures. Hope loved showing her drawings to Killian, but Emma began to notice that there were occasionally ones she chose to leave at home. These drawings, Hope explained when Emma asked, were ones of Hope and sometimes Emma _with_ Killian, at home, or the park, or anywhere other than the prison visiting room outside of which she had never seen him. “I thought they might make Daddy sad,” she said matter-of-factly.

Emma shouldn’t have been surprised that Killian Jones’s daughter would be possessed of an especially acute impulse to protect the people she loved. But she hadn’t expected or wanted her to be forced to exercise it before she had even started kindergarten. 

Finally, Hope moved past expressing her own sense of deprivation as sadness at Killian’s plight. “I want my daddy!” she would cry certain nights, and any reminders of a coming visit would be met with an outraged, “But I want to see him _now_.” 

“So do I,” Emma would sometimes admit. Because the truth was, past a certain point, there was nothing she could say to make it any better. Maybe the best thing she could do for Hope was to acknowledge the grief they shared, not to be so quick to hold back her own tears until Hope couldn’t see. 

But even now, she couldn’t accept it. Every year, Emma had petitioned Arthur for a pardon. Every year, she had been turned down, as had been attempts she had made through several channels to secure a meeting. Still, she simply could not imagine doing this for the seven years it would take for Killian to come up for parole, let alone the fifteen left on his full sentence.

Grudgingly, she thought of maybe setting her sights lower, at least for the short term. If it wasn’t possible to bring Killian home, maybe she could get him transferred to a less secure facility, one that would allow for more contact between them. Even being able to sit across a table without the glass dividing them, to exchange quick hugs at the end of a visit, would be so much better than what they had. If there wasn’t anywhere nearby, Emma and Hope would move to be near him.

Emma had just begun researching her options, however, when an opportunity arrived from one of the last places she had been anticipating it.

Late one night, long after Hope had gone to sleep, Emma’s phone rang. The number was unfamiliar, but she answered it immediately, expecting some emergency involving one of the Foundation’s clients. Instead, she was met with a voice that she recognized at once, even though it seemed to have lost some of its habitual, icy cool in the five years since Emma had last heard it.

“Mrs. Jones? This is Elsa of Arendelle.”

*****

“What,” said Emma – and it was her voice, now, that could be called icy, “Could you _possibly_ have to say to me?”

“Just this,” the other woman answered. “Arthur will be alone, in room 63 of the Cliffside Hotel, at 10 o’clock tomorrow night.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she grew more direct. “His guards have learned to be discreet about meetings like this. They won’t notice if it’s you and not me.”

So it was true. There had been rumors for years of an affair between Elsa and Arthur, rumors that hadn’t abated when Arthur had married two years ago. Gwen was from an old family who had stayed during Regina’s reign, and it was widely perceived as a politically smart move. Far smarter than it would have been to openly court the leader of Arendelle, however grateful people were over Elsa’s help in overthrowing Regina.

Emma cared about none of this, except insofar as it might provide her with a last chance to plead for Killian. She also couldn’t help but be suspicious. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t think I have to explain myself to you,” replied Elsa, her tone giving no indication of whether her words should be taken as defensiveness or simple fact, and ended the call.

*****

Emma told no one where she was going. Not her parents, and certainly not Killian, who could afford another disappointment even less than she could. Hope was asleep by the time Emma had to leave, and she used the pretext of a problem with one of their more recent foster placements as an excuse with her mother and father. If they wondered why she was wearing her hair in a long braid down her back, a style she had never worn before, they didn’t comment.

Arthur’s men were good enough at their job that Emma couldn’t have identified them among the people milling about the hotel, though she knew they must be there. They were not good enough at their job to notice that their boss’s girlfriend had lost a few inches in height, or to bother to look more closely at the face half-concealed under a hood as she opened the unlocked door. 

Arthur had been looking out the window. He turned, moving forward with what might have been the intention of an embrace, when he stopped short at the sight of Emma. 

“Emma Nolan?” he said, uncomprehending.

“Emma Jones,” she corrected. “You were expecting a different blond?”

He closed his eyes, grimacing. “Elsa told you I’d be here.”

“Yes.”

“I know what you’ve come about, of course.” He seemed to have recovered quickly from his immediate shock, and adjusted his posture so that he appeared taller. Almost regal. “It’s still impossible.”

“It isn’t impossible,” said Emma. “You just won’t do it. There’s a difference.” 

“And why should I?” countered Arthur. “He’s done enough to deserve worse.”

“Maybe,” Emma acknowledged. She had accepted that long ago. “But that isn’t what he’s being punished for.”

“It was a fair trial, and -”

Emma ignored it as an interruption. “He’s being punished because you lied.”

“Lied about what?”

“About not building your new world with hands steeped in blood.”

Arthur had the dignity not to pretend he didn’t catch her meaning. “I didn’t know,” he said. “That was Elsa’s plan. I never knew.”

“Maybe not at first,” she conceded. “But soon after. Before you let the man who gave you your country back get sentenced to twenty years. Before you let him miss four years of his daughter’s life.” 

He didn’t deny it. Emma added, on an instinct, “Tell me. Have you kept your hands clean since?” 

She could see at once that she had hit her mark. This was a man who knew what it was to compromise. To dig in the soil of his kingdom, and learn too late that he had put down roots in sand.

Unexpectedly, he turned the tables. “Have you?”

“No,” said Emma. Suddenly, she found that she wanted to confess to this man. For Killian’s sake, and for hers. But she couldn’t. Not now, and not ever, except for perhaps once, many years from now, to Hope. That was _her_ punishment, her penance.

“Then what right do you have to judge me?”

“I’m not,” she answered. “Not for that.” It was a good society, the one Arthur was making. Whatever he had done, it wasn’t for Emma to calculate whether the cost had been worth it. “When we don’t have bricks, sometimes blood is all that’s left to build with.” 

She walked closer to him. “I could have forgiven you for that. I think most people would have, in time. But building it on the back of my family’s suffering – after a certain point, it became cruel. Even Elsa saw it, in the end.”

“Elsa’s out of office,” Arthur said. “She’s not risking anything.”

But Emma didn’t think even he believed it. She would never know precisely what had passed between those two, to lead them to this moment, but she knew too well that there were things more painful to risk than kingdoms. Improbable as it was, Elsa had joined the long line of people who had been willing to pay a price for helping Emma and Killian. “I think,” she said quietly, “that you know that isn’t true.”

Arthur turned back to the window and stood there for a minute, apparently irresolute. When he looked at Emma again, he said, “If I say no, you’re going to blackmail me, aren’t you?” 

Emma wished she could say she wouldn’t. But the truth is, she knew, if all else failed, that she would try it. For Killian and Hope, she could take that guilt, at least, on herself. “Don’t make me,” she said instead, her mind flashing back, unwillingly, to a different moment, in a different inn, five years earlier.

_Please, Regina._ Even Killian must have thought she was pleading for his life. She hadn’t been. She had been giving Regina a final chance, and giving herself one. 

Sometimes you had no choice. Sometimes you did. Emma, too, could be merciful. She was close enough to Arthur, now, that she could feel his breath on her face.

“It doesn’t have to be a pardon,” she said. She wouldn’t ask him to rewrite the past. She didn’t have to. “Commute his sentence. Not an act of justice. An act of grace.”

She waited. “Please, Arthur,” she said finally.

He walked to the desk, and picked up his pen. 

*****

Emma’s first thought was to drive to the prison, _now_. But her second was that they could all wait a very few hours longer. She needed to do this right.

She didn’t go to sleep, taking the time to think, and pack a bag, and call Nemo’s office again and again until he finally answered. By the time they had finished with the arrangements, it was the hour that she would usually be waking Hope for school.

It wasn’t until they were already in the car that she told her they were going somewhere else. “We’re going to visit Daddy.” 

Hope by now knew enough about time and how it passed to question it. “But it’s Wednesday.”

“I know,” said Emma. “This is going to be a special visit. We’re going to get to go see Daddy in his room. Just this once.”

“Will we get to hug and kiss him?” she asked excitedly. “For real?”

“For real,” Emma promised.

Nemo had instructed them to come to a different entrance than they usually did, and was there to greet them when they arrived. Though he knew not to say anything in front of Hope, he hugged Emma when he saw her, and she could tell how genuinely pleased he was for them. He led them through antiseptic, grey corridors that Emma had never seen before. For five long years, it had been Killian’s whole world.

Though, when they entered the cell, she had cause to remember that it hadn’t been. Killian wasn’t there yet, she and Nemo having decided it would be better to have him sent down once Emma and Hope had already arrived. Whatever word they used around Hope, no one other than a four-year-old would mistake it for anything but a cell, with its dull, concrete walls and heavy door and the flimsy cot inches from the toilet. But, as Killian had told them, nearly every bit of wall that Killian could reach had been covered in photographs of Hope and Emma. Emma noticed that he had arranged them in a rough order, creating a sort of timeline of all the days of Hope’s life that he had missed. 

This place had never been Killian’s whole world. They had never allowed it to happen.

A buzzing noise sounded, and the door opened. 

*****

Killian was nervous as the guards led him from the library back to his cell. Cell inspections generally happened when you were already _in_ your cell, and he didn’t like to think what would require a deviation in the routine. No one had bothered him about it before, but Killian knew he had far more pictures up than regulations allowed. If they decided to start caring today, Killian only hoped that they would give him a chance to take them down himself rather than simply throwing them indiscriminately in the trash.

But then the door opened, and Killian didn’t have the time to think of anything at all before a small body barreled into his legs, shouting “Daddy!” He knelt down, and in an instant, for the first time in more than four years, Killian was holding his daughter in his arms. This time, he could feel her heart beating wildly against his as she dissolved into tears. As he held her, he looked over her shoulder to Emma. He didn’t want to break the moment, but had to know.

“I arranged it with Nemo,” she said, interpreting the glance.

Of course she had. Had given him one more, unimaginable gift. He couldn’t bring himself to ask how long they had.

After a few minutes, he gently put Hope aside, saying, “Let’s give your mother a turn, okay, love?” 

Killian assumed that there was a baseline expectation for the appropriate level of physical affection that parents should exhibit before their children. If there was, he was fairly sure he and Emma had just surpassed it with their kiss. He didn’t care. Hope had had to deal with more damaging things than seeing some evidence of just how much her parents loved each other.

When they, too, had broken apart, Hope tugged on Emma’s hand, in what she apparently recognized as a signal to lean down and let her whisper something in her ear. Emma reached into a large bag that Killian was just now noticing – what did she _have_ in there? – and took out a book. Killian had never seen it before – not, at least, in that form – but he thought he knew what it was.

They moved to the bed, Killian sitting between Emma and Hope. He went to put his arms around them, and froze, for a moment, when he realized that he had unthinkingly sat with his left side to Hope. She had been able to see his stump, of course, through the glass, but this was different. He was about to suggest switching sides, when Hope snuggled herself into the crook of the shortened arm, reaching for the place where it ended. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” Killian assured her, and she opened the book.

Emma, trained by long practice, told the story well. As Killian had expected, she was far more generous to him than he deserved, but he didn’t correct her on it, though he did sometimes interject – unprompted, or at Hope’s request – with additions of his own. A few times, Hope corrected _him_ ; he wasn’t telling it right. Not like Mommy did; not like Hope now could.

By the time they had finished, Nemo was standing at the door of the cell. So that was it, then. But before Killian could begin trying to find, again, the right words, Emma slipped off the bed and onto the floor, crouching at eye level to Hope.

“Remember what I told you, sweetheart? You’re going to go with Mr. Nemo now, so Mommy can talk to Daddy alone for a little bit. I promise you’ll see him again before we leave. Just five minutes.” 

Killian looked at her in confusion, but she didn’t return the glance, keeping her eyes on Hope as if willing her not to protest. Why was she sending her away? She couldn’t intend…

Well. It had been five years, but Killian still thought that, if it _was_ that, he would last a little longer than five _minutes_.

“Okay, Mommy,” said Hope.

“Thank you, Hope,” said Emma. “But first, there’s something I want you to give Daddy. A present.”

She went back into her bag, and took out a piece of paper. “What does it say?” asked Hope. 

“I’ll tell you later,” Emma said. “Be careful with it, now.”

She was, and he accepted the paper from her hands, noting the ornate, flowing script.

_On this day, by my right as President of this land, I hereby order…_

By the time Killian realized what he was holding, Hope was gone from the room.

“Is it real?” was his first, urgent question. Given who he was talking to, it seemed necessary to verify this.

“Yes,” said Emma, laughing through her tears. “I got in to see Arthur late last night. Elsa helped.”

“We need to tell Hope,” he said, not wanting to make her wait another second. 

But Emma held him back. “Wait,” she said. “Not like this.”

Killian had gotten used to putting on and removing the jumpsuit himself over the past five years, but this time, he didn’t have to. He felt his body responding as she stripped it off and helped him replace it with proper clothing, her hands slow and caressing as she worked, but he realized that he _could_ wait. There would be time for that later. All the time in the world.

When he was dressed, he again made to go, and again, she stopped him. 

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Going one more time to the bag, she drew out his hook.

Killian hesitated. It was hardly the most important part of himself that he had been missing, but he _had_ missed it, and he could feel his arm almost twitching to have it back. But there were other things to think of.

“Maybe I shouldn’t,” he said. “Hope didn’t mind the stump. I wouldn’t want to scare her. Or worse, hurt her with it.” 

Emma laughed. “Are you kidding? She _loves_ your hook. It was all I could do to stop her from bringing it to school for show-and-tell. Her teacher would have loved that,” she added wryly, and Killian could hear that there was a story behind it. He didn’t know it yet, but he would. That, and all the other stories left untold. 

“As for hurting her,” said Emma, holding it out to him, “Well. Feel it.” 

He did. Over the sharp point was a rounded silver cap, blending seamlessly with the rest of the metal. 

“Are you telling me,” said Killian, in a tone of mock indignation, “that in the eight or ten or however many hours you had between talking to Arthur and coming here, you went out and found a place to _childproof my hook_?” 

“No,” said Emma, suddenly serious.

“When?” he asked softly.

“Two weeks after Hope was born.” She drew even closer to him, putting her arms around his neck. “If it had been twenty years, we would have waited twenty years, and you would have held our grandchildren with it. But I was always bringing you home. Even if it was sometimes hard to keep believing it.”

He attached the hook to his arm, and was, at long last, almost whole. “Let’s get our daughter,” he said, and they walked out of the cell together. 

*****

Hope had her back to them as they entered Nemo’s office, but she turned at once at the sound of Killian’s voice saying her name. The startling change in his appearance immediately registered with her, and she looked between the two of them for an explanation of what it meant. 

“You’re wearing your hook,” she said. “Mommy said it wasn’t allowed.”

He knelt. “It is now,” he said to her. “Hope, I’m coming home. We’re going to leave right now. All three of us.”

“For how long?” she asked, not yet moving toward him, and even now, it hurt Emma to see that Hope, too, had learned to temper her expectations, had found out that it wasn’t safe to want too much. She and Killian would have to work on that. 

“Forever,” he said, and finally, Hope believed, closing the space between them, and jumping into her father’s waiting arms.

*****

It wasn’t until the next day that Emma and Killian got more than an odd minute alone together. Though David and Mary Margaret had wanted to respect their need for privacy, they had deserved to be part of the celebration, and so all five of them spent much of the day together, punctuating the moments in which Hope was distracted with what were in some cases long over-due explanations and reminiscences. Killian, for the first time, learned exactly how he had come to be present for Hope’s birth, though he realized that the others, too, were missing parts of the story: Ava had never revealed to them her connection to Killian. That was something he would tell Emma, and only Emma, later on.

There were other things, even now, that he thought would never be told. Though the night he had first come to this house was no longer a memory too painful to discuss, as they did, he shared a look with David, silently agreeing that there were still a few lines it would be best to leave out. Emma, he could tell, was deliberately summarizing her conversation with Arthur, and he wondered what had been said that she was holding back, and why. 

Even before today, he had always known there were gaps in what they told each other. Killian was sure that there were times when raising Hope must have been far more difficult than Emma’s rosy pictures allowed. Neither had he ever shared with her the more painful details of life in the prison, though he suspected she had done enough homework to have an accurate enough idea of most of it. One day, maybe they would begin to talk about some of these things, but only if it felt right, and after they had had the time to make many better memories together.

The real reason they hadn’t been alone, of course, was Hope. She had refused to let Killian out of her sight, and the three of them had slept together in Emma’s bed. The contrast between where Killian had spent his last night, and where he was now, was almost overwhelming, and he had lain awake long after Hope and even Emma were asleep, watching them, simply because he could. 

Hope resisted going to school the next morning. If it were up to Killian, he would have given in for one more day, but Emma overruled her, and Killian wasn’t about to interfere. The details of integrating himself into their daily lives was a balance, he knew, that would eventually have to be navigated, but that, too, could wait. They brought her to the door of her classroom together. Killian had been about to remove his hook before he left the car, but Emma said “Don’t you dare,” and he remembered her comment about Hope’s teacher from the day before.

Killian had vowed some time ago that whenever he got out of prison, he wasn’t risking so much as a citation for jaywalking for the rest of his days. But that didn’t mean he was ever going to be a saint.

The woman’s face went ashen when she saw who was walking through her classroom door. Putting on his most charming smile, he said, “Ah, you must be Hope’s teacher. I’m her father. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” And, as Hope’s hand was in his, he offered her his hook to shake.

Finally taking pity on her, he eventually lowered his arm and leaned down to kiss Hope. “I’ll be back here with Mommy as soon as it’s time to go home,” he said.

“Promise?” she said.

“On my life.”

When they left, Emma kept driving until they reached the borders of Sherwood Forest. These, Killian noticed, were further back than they once would have been, the outskirts having been developed since the old days. He thought for a while that she might be taking him to Granny’s, but he still knew this forest well enough to recognize when she had deviated from that path, and realized where they were heading.

Their cabin was almost unrecognizable. The wood had been replaced in some areas and polished in others, and a window had been carved out beside the door, bordered by neat curtains. He was almost embarrassed to remember the pride with which, all those years ago, he had presented Emma with the cheap furnishings he had scavenged when he saw the care with which she had decorated it, with a rich, colorful rug, a mahogany table and chair set, and a bed as full a size as the small room could reasonably accommodate.

“I texted Ruby to come ahead and prepare,” Emma said, almost shyly. “I thought we deserved a romantic evening.”

Ruby might have done a final bit of cleaning. But it was too obvious to require saying that this, like the adjustments to his hook, had not been the work of a single night, or two.

Belatedly, he registered what Emma had said. “It’s broad daylight,” he noted.

She took his hand, leading him to the bed. “We have a four-year-old,” she said. “Romantic evenings are relative.”

Much later, they were still in bed when Killian said, “Someday, I’m going to have to tell Hope the truth. About my past.”

Emma turned in his arms to face him. “She loves you,” she said. “She’ll forgive you.”

He wished it were that simple. “It will spoil her storybook,” he said, finally.

“Then we’ll write her a different one,” she replied, kissing him. “Just like we always have.”

And so they would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, that's a wrap! The pleasure I got out of writing this fic - despite what I was putting the characters through in those last several chapters -- can be expressed by recalling that I said in the notes at the beginning that I would be updating once a week, and then wound up writing at least three chapters a week. 
> 
> Thank you once again to everyone who has left kudos and commented - and if you've read and enjoyed and haven't done so, yet, I'd love to hear from you now!


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